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FRIEDRICH EDUJ1RD BENEKE 



THE MAN AND HIS PHILOSOPHY 



AN INTRODUCTORY STUDY 



^ 



BY 

FRANCIS BURKE BRANDT, A. B. 



SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS 

FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY 

IN THE 

University Faculty of Philosophy 
Columbia College 



NEW YORK 
May, 1895 



*v 




INTRODUCTORY NOTE 



While the following work in form is in no sense deliber- 
ately polemic, it will be found in spirit to contain as its un- 
derlying thought the contention that, if German idealistic 
philosophy is to be regarded as a systematic development, 
the true development after Kant is to be found, not in 
Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, but in the philosophical sys- 
tem of Friedrich Eduard Beneke. This is only to say in 
other words that in the philosophy of Beneke we have both 
in outcome and in method the profoundest metaphysical 
insight of our century. While this may seem a bold claim 
on behalf of a philosopher comparatively obscure, it is be- 
lieved that the evidence of the following pages will justify 
the assertion. The reasons for Beneke's accidental obscura- 
tion are there set forth. That this has not been due to the 
inherent deficiency of Beneke's system, is also amply proved 
by the progressively increasing recognition of its significance 
and importance on the part of German historians of philos- 
ophy. For example, in the earlier histories, as Schwegler's 
(Stuttgart, 1847), E. Reinhold's (Jena, 1854), Beneke is not 
even mentioned. In more recent works, like those of Erd- 
mann and Windelband, he is practically neglected and his 
significance unappreciated. It is therefore significant that 
in a most recent German history of philosophy, 1 not only is 

^ergmann: Geschichte der Philosophie, Berlin, 1893. 2 v °l s - (Vol. II.: 
Die deutsche Philosophie von Kant bis Beneke?) This work first fell into the 
hands of the writer just as the present volume was going to press. 

(v) 



vi INTR OD UCTOR Y NO TE 

German philosophy made to end with Beneke, but in a work 
which assigns forty pages to Hegel, Beneke is given an 
equal space. 

It may be added that the following pages do not pretend 
to give a full presentation of Beneke' s views in their coercive 
completeness. Beneke's philosophical system is too ex- 
tended to be brought with convincing force into so narrow 
a compass. This work therefore hopes to serve chiefly as 
an introductory statement which may prove of value both 
in exhibiting the spirit and significance of the system, and 
in stimulating to such further study as may result not merely 
in a juster appreciation of a neglected man, but also in a 
truer conception of metaphysical truth. 



CONTENTS 



PART I— THE MAN 



CHAPTER I 

PAGE 

Early Life and Opening Career 15-25 

I. Boyhood and Early Education 15 

II. Interdiction, and Sojourn at Go ttingen 18 



CHAPTER II 

Life Activity at Berlin 26-37 

I. Intellectual Development 26 

(1) Formative Philosophical Influences 26 

(2) Relation to Kant 28 

(a) Critic of the Kantian Philosophy .... 28 

(b) Pioneer of " the Movement back to Kant." 29 
II. Life Effort and Literary Activity . . . # 31 

( 1 ) Opposition to the Philosophical Tendencies of the 

Times 31 

(2) Lectures and Writings 33 

III. Character 36 

(vii) 



viii CONTENTS 

PART II-THE PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER I 



PAGE 



Historical Basis and Theory of Knowledge 38-52 

§ 1. General Introduction 38 

I. Doctrines of Perception before Kant. 40 

§ 2. Shortcomings of Earlier Doctrines ..... 40 

II. The Kantian Theory 41 

§ 3. General Character of the Problem 41 

§ 4. Aim of the Kantian Philosophy 43 

§ 5. The Kantian Theory Stated by Beneke ... 44 
§ 6. Kantian Distinction of Knowledge Independent 

of Experience 45 

§ 7. Beneke's Criticism of this Theory 47 

§ 8. Resolution of the Inherent Contradiction of 

the Kantian Theory 49 

§ 9. Internal Sense Yields Knowledge of a Thing in 

Itself 50 

§ 10. Permanent Value of the Kantian Analysis . . 51 

CHAPTER II 

Beneke's System in General Outline 53—71 

I. The Scope and Method of Psychology . , 53 

§ 11. Starting Point of Empirical Psychology ... 53 

§ 12. Subject Matter of Empirical Psychology ... 54 

§ 13. Psychology as Distinguished from Outer Sci- 
ences 55 

§ 14. The Method of Psychology 55 

II. The Relation of Soul and Body .......... 55 

§ 15. The Method of Natural Science is Not Mater- 
ialism 55 

§ 16. Opposition of Soul and Body One in and for 

Consciousness 56 

§ 17. Psychical and Corporeal Processes Likewise 

Distinctions for Consciousness 57 

§ 18. The Real Relation between Soul and Body . . 58 



CONTENTS j x 

PAGE 

III. The Origin of Consciousness 60 

§ 19. Meaning of "Origin of Consciousness." ... 60 

§ 20. Metaphysical Method of Solution 60 

§ 21. Psychological Method of Solution 62 

§ 22. Source of the Notion that Self- Consciousness is 

Materially Conditioned 64 

IV. The Unity of Mind or Consciousness 65 

§ 23. Beneke Compared with English and with Ger- 
man Thinkers 65 

§ 24. The Soul as a Hierarchy of Faculties .... 66 

§ 25. The Soul as a " Simple," or Abstract Unity . . 67 

§ 26. The Soul as a Concrete Psychical Organism . 70 



CHAPTER III 

Beneke's Empirical Psychology — Introduction .... 72-86 

I. Psychology as a Natural Science 72 

§ 27. Introduction 72 

§ 28. Inner Experience the Immediate Object of 

Psychology 72 

§ 29. The Objective Method Dealing with the Inner 

Experience of Others 73 

§ 30. The Subjective Method Dealing with the Ex- 
perience of One's Own Self 74 

§ 31. Possibility of Applying the Method of the Ex- 
ternal Sciences to Inner Experience .... 74 
II. General Natm'e of the Psychological Problem .... 76 

§ 32. The Problem Stated 76 

§ 33. Previous Attempts at Solution 76 

§ 34. The Problem as Conceived by Beneke .... 81 

III. Beneke's Doctrine of Traces 82 

§ 35. Transition 82 

§ 36. The Fact of Psychical Persistence and How 

Known 82 

§ 37. Nature of Unconscious Persistence 84 

§ 38. The Philosophical Significance of Memory . 85 



x CONTENTS 

CHAPTER IV 

PAGE 

The Psychology of Inner Experience 87-110 

I. General Introduction 87 

§ 39. Transition 87 

§ 40. Knowledge both Product and Process .... 87 
§ 41. Changes to Consciousness and Changes in 

Consciousness 88 

II. Inner Experience : Origin of Individual Facts .... 89 

§ 42. The Facts of Inner Experience 89 

§ 43. The Origin and Growth of Ideas 89 

(1) Memories. . . 90 

(2) Concepts 91 

(3) Judgments , 92 

(4) Inferences 93 

§ 44. First Fundamental Psychological Process . . 94 

III. Inner Experience : A Continuous Process of Redistri- 

bution 95 

§ 45. Introduction 95 

§ 46. Alteration in Inner Experience a Change in 

Activity 95 

§ 47. Beneke's Doctrine of " Movable Elements." . . 96 
§ 48. Immediately Active Inner Consciousness the 

Resultant of a Dynamic Process 98 

§ 49. Why Forms Immediately Present in Inner Con- 
sciousness become Inactive 100 

§ 50. Second Fundamental Psychological Process . . 10 1 

IV. Inner Experience : An Association of Ideas 101 

§ 51. Introduction 101 

A. — The Connections Between Ideas ". . 102 

§ 52. Nature of the Problem 102 

§ 53. Nature of the Union between Like Psychical 

Forms 102 

§ 54. Effect of Conscious Activity on the Inner Char- 
acter of the Trace 103 

§ 55. Effect of the Inner Character of the Trace on 

Active Consciousness 105 



CONTENTS XI 

PAGE 

§ 56. Laws of Quantitative Differences of Presenta- 
tions 106 

§ 5 7. Nature of the Union between Unlike Psychical 

Forms 106 

§ 58. Connections between Conscious Forms Strength- 
ened by Repetition 108 

B. — Direction Followed in the Transference of Con- 
scious Activity 109 

§ 59. Law of the Direction of Consciousness . . . 109 

§ 60. The Law Applied to the Old Laws of Association. 109 

CHAPTER V 

The Psychology of Outer Experience 111-120 

§ 61. Introduction 111 

I. Outer Experience : Origin and Growth of Percepts . . 11 1 
§ 62. Fundamental Characteristics of the Perceptive 

Consciousness in 

§ 63. The Origin of Sense-Perceptions 112 

§ 64. Sense-Perceptions as Products of Subjective 

and Objective Factors 113 

§ 65. Nature and Meaning of "Original Sense-Im- 
pressions." 114 

§ 66. Significance of Original Minimal Sensations as 

Inevitable Hypotheses 115 

§ 67. Beneke's Doctrine of Primary Powers .... 116 

§ 68. Third Fundamental Psychological Process . . 117 

II. Outer Experience : Objective Relations of Percepts . . 117 

§ 69. Introduction 117 

§ 70. Nature of the Problem 118 

§ 71. Objective Relations Depend on Original Organic 

Relations of the Primary Powers 118 

§ 72. Objective and Subjective Connections Distin- 
guished . 120 



x ii CONTENTS 

CHAPTER VI 

PAGE 

Conclusions Relating to both Inner and Outer Conscious 

Experience 1 21-139 

I. The Character and Kinds of Active Consciousness . . 121 
' § 73. Character of Consciousness as Determined by 

Methods of Excitation 121 

§ 74. The Nature of Voluntary Action . 122 

§ 75. Character of Consciousness as Determined by 

Kinds of Primary Powers 123 

§ 76. Immediate Consciousness as Determined by the 

Relation of Power and Stimulant 124 

§ 77. The Threefold Nature of Consciousness ... 125 

II. The Span of Immediate Consciousness 126 

§ 78. Introduction 126 

§ 79. The Span of Inner Consciousness 126 

§ 80. The Span of Outer Consciousness 128 

§ Si. The Relation between Sleeping and Waking . 129 
§ 82. Why the Activity of Various Systems Monopo- 
lizes Immediate Consciousness 129 

§83. Fourth Fundamental Psychological Process . . 131 

III. The Nature and Meaning of Consciousness 132 

§ 84. Introduction 132 

A. — Consciousness as Presented Contents 132 

§ 85. Consciousness Distinguished as Presented Con- 
tents 132 

§ 86. Grades of Clearness of Presented Contents . . 133 
§ 87. " Unconsciousness" Distinguished as (1) Less 

Clear, and as (2) Non-presented Contents. 134 

B. — Consciousness as Presentative Process 136 

§ 88. Consciousness Distinguished as Presentative 

Activity 136 

§ 89. Clear Consciousness as a Grade of Presentative 

Activity 136 

§ 90. Grades of Presentative Activity 138 

§ 91. "Unconsciousness" Distinguished as Non-ex- 
citation 139 



CONTENTS x iii 

CHAPTER VII 



PAGE 



Applied Psychology — Metaphysics 140-156 

§ 92. Introduction 140 

I. The Original Nature and Being of the Soul ..... 141 
§ 93. Psychological Summary of the Nature of the 

Soul '. 141 

§ 94. Unity of Consciousness Distinguished from 

Unity of Being 142 

§ 95. The Soul a Concrete Psychical Organism . . . 143 

II. The Nature and Limits of Knowledge 144 

§ 96. The Intuition of Self 144 

§ 97. The Origin and Content of "Inner Sense." . 145 

§ 98. The Soul the Only Being Known In Itself. . . 147 

III. Knowledge of Beings Other than Self 148 

§ 99. Fundamental Starting Point 148 

§ 100. How Knowledge of the Existence of Other 

Beings is Attained 148 

§ 101. The Being of Other Men 150 

§ 102. The Being of Material Things 151 

§ 103. The External World, So Far as Concerns Our 
Fellow-Beings, Neither Unknown Nor Un- 
knowable 152 

IV. God and Immortality 153 

§ 104. Introduction 153 

§ 105. The Existence of God 153 

§ 106. Immortality . 154 



CONCLUDING CHAPTER 



I. Brief Critical Estimate 157 

II. Permanent Influence and Followers 161 

III. Bibliography 164 



Part I 



THE MAN 



CHAPTER I 

Early Life and Opening Career 

The life of Friedrich Eduard Beneke naturally divides into 
two important periods. The first period includes the early 
life and career of Beneke up to the close of his sojourn at 
Gottingen, where after the interdiction of his early lectures 
at Berlin he found a welcome refuge. The second period 
begins with his return to Berlin, where the remainder of his 
long career was spent in active work at the great University. 
The present chapter is concerned with the first period. 

I BOYHOOD AND EARLY EDUCATION 
Beneke had the privilege of spending his boyhood days 
under the kindly eyes of his parents at Berlin, where on 
February 17th, 1798, he was born. His father was a Com- 
missioner of Justice and Attorney-General. His mother was 
the sister of a preacher named Wilmsen, well known as the 
writer of stories for young people. No particular facts re- 
lating to either father or mother seem extant, but of the 
uncle it is said that his stimulating nature was not without 
permanent influence on the later life of the young Beneke. 
In his early education Beneke had the advantage of the 
281] 15 



1 6 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [ 2 8 2 

best schools at Berlin. So rapidly did he advance in his pre- 
paratory studies that by his twelfth year he was ready to 
enter the upper third class of the Friedrich Werner Gym- 
nasium, then under the direction of Bernhardi. Here he 
showed earnest love of study and developed a marked inter- 
est in mathematics. His versatility, however, went much 
farther. It extended to metrical translations of the classical 
poets, as well as to the production of some original poetic 
flights. Both of these performances made him known among 
his associates as "the poet." During this period, too, he 
developed a keen interest in gymnastic exercises and out- 
door sports. This resulted in a vigorousness of body that 
served him in good stead, when, in 1815, he left school to 
enlist as a volunteer in the German war of independence. 

The war having ended, Beneke, at Easter, 18 16, began 
his university career with the study of theology at Halle. 
Here he came under the influence of the theologians Knapp 
and Gesenius. So successful was he in his theological studies 
that he twice gained a prize of honor. His interest at this 
time was to no small degree philosophical also, and this inter- 
est it was, perhaps, that brought him back the following year 
to Berlin. The young theologian then took his first exami- 
nations, and in order to qualify himself for practical work, 
became a hearer of the best pulpit orators in Berlin, among 
whom was Schleiermacher, whose church every Sunday was 
the assembling place of the most cultivated church-goers. It 
was while attending these discourses that the young theolo- 
gian first became clearly conscious of his true mission. 
"That was," says Dr. Schmidt, "to open up anew path in 
the province of philosophy." 1 This insight into the nature 
of his mission was doubtless partly the result of Schleier- 
macher's stimulation, and partly the result of the searching 
conversations which Beneke was accustomed to hold with 

1 Padagogisches Jahrbuch fur 1836, p. 8. 



2 8 3 1 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE j j 

his brother, as the two wended their way to hear the great 
preacher. At any rate, this mission became at this time the 
resolution of his life, and the following two years were spent 
in active preparation for his work. 

In the winter of 1820, Beneke began as privat docent, his 
first lectures at the University of Berlin. In his inaugural 
dissertation, De veris philosophies initiis, he struck the key- 
note of the " pioneer movement" which he contemplated. 
This new philosophical standpoint had indeed already been 
indicated in two small works, 2 previously published this year, 
but in the inaugural it was, as Dressier says, still " more 
clearly demonstrated." The new standpoint contended for 
in the three works mentioned, questioned most deeply the 
matter of philosophical method, and the prevailing theory of 
knowledge. As to the first point, in its declarations against 
the a priori method it was most emphatic, setting over against 
this method a purely empirical one, and holding that the 
fundamental basis for all knowledge must be experience — 
inner experience. This was directed in part against the 
Kantian a priori " forms" of knowledge, in part against the 
prevailing attempt to reach a knowledge of the absolute de- 
ductively. As to the second point, it criticised sharply the 
Kantian doctrine of the " internal sense," which regarded 
this form of experience as also phenomenal, and so as yield- 
ing no absolute knowledge of the Soul or Ego in itself. In 
opposition to this, it enunciated the important principle that 
in inner experience we gain absolute knowledge of a thing in 
itself, and that thing the soul. Or, to put it in the words of 
Falckenberg, who has most compactly and clearly sum- 
marized Beneke's position as set forth in these works : 

2 Outlines of the Theory of Knowledge {Erkenntnisslehre nach dem Bewusst- 
sein der reinen Vernunft in ihren Grundzilgen dargelegt, Jena, 1820 s ) . 

Empirical Psychology as the Basis of all Knowlege {Erfahrungsseelenlehre ah 
Grundlage alles Wissens in ihren Hauptzilgen dargestellt, Berlin, 1820). 



1 8 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [284 

" The root and basis of all knowledge is experience ; meta- 
physics is itself an empirical science ; it is the last in the 
series of philosophical disciplines. Whoever begins with 
metaphysics, instead of ending with it, begins the house at 
the roof. The point of departure for all cognition is inner 
experience or self-observation ; hence the fundamental 
science is psychology, and all other branches of philosophy 
nothing but applied psychology. By the inner sense we 
perceive our ego as it really is, not merely as it appears to 
us ; the only object whose per se we immediately know is the 
soul ; in self-consciousness being and representation are 
one." 3 

When it is remembered that the prevailing philosophy at 
Berlin at this time was that of Hegel, and that the influence 
of Fichte had by no means yet passed away, one is able to ap- 
preciate the Herculean task to which Beneke, nothing daunted, 
had set himself. But the young twenty-four-year-old privat 
docent soon found that his real difficulties were to come not 
from a fair and inherent conflict of thought with thought, in 
which truth would be given opportunity to prevail, but from 
personal and preconceived opposition, backed by the keen 
edge of governmental authority. 

II INTERDICTION AND SOJOURN AT GOTTINGEN 
Early in the summer of 1822, Beneke's lectures at Berlin 
were brought to a sudden close. Notice was sent that dur- 
ing the comming summer semester his lectures must not be 
continued. Beneke was astounded. With a good deal of 
persistence, he sought again and again from the authorities 
some explanation of the interdiction, but in vain. Finally he 
appealed to the government. At last, to one of the many 
remonstrances made by him, he received from Minister Von 

3 Falckenberg, History of Modern Philosophy (tr. by A. C. Armstrong, New 
York, 1893), p. 510. 



285] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE IOy 

Altenstein, under date of March 5, 1822, a letter 4 in which 
it was stated that his recently published book, "Ground- 
work of the Physics of Morals," had caused some doubt as 
to his fitness to teach, and until some decision could be 
reached on this point, his lectures could not be received* 
Further, that the matter had been turned over to Chancellor 
Schultz, to whom he must apply for any further explanation. 
Many efforts were made to see Chancellor Schultz, but he 
was a hard man to get at. Finally, after a long delay, 
Beneke's uncle succeeded in getting a letter from him, dated 
July 15, 1822, in which he said that maturer investigation 
had only confirmed his originally hasty impression, viz. : 
that Minister Von Altenstein had sufficient reason to refuse 
Beneke's lectures. " Ina ccordance with my duty and con- 
science," he writes, " I cannot therefore propose anything 
else than that henceforth permission to deliver philosophical 
discourses at this place continue denied to Dr. Beneke." 5 

One learns with a good deal of indignation of the efforts, 
official and personal, which were made to stifle the opposing 
thought of the promising young philosopher. There seems 
good reason for believing that these efforts were ultimately 
traceable to the influence of Hegel, whose overweening belief 
in the superiority of his own philosophical system had made 
him inimical even to the privilege of a hearing for an oppos- 
ing thinker. While the ostensible cause for Beneke's exclu- 
sion from the University was his " Physics of Morals," and 
the formal objection to this was contained in the use of the 
term " Physics," back of this lay a far deeper reason, to 
which indeed this word "Physics" was the keynote. For 
Beneke had used the term as a sharp antithesis to " Meta- 
physics," meaning thereby to differentiate his own method 

4 Given in the Pddagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, pp. 9-10. 

5 Pddagogisches Jahrbuch, 1 856, p. II. The letter is given in full. 



20 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE T 2 8 6 

from the metaphysical one of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and 
Hegel. As a matter of fact, it was Beneke's intelligent op- 
position to this method that the government, under the 
influence of Hegel, endeavored to crush. 

Ueberweg goes no further, it is true, than to say that 
" Beneke pretended to have discovered that this interdict 
resulted from the representations made by Hegel to his 
friend, Minister von Altenstein, and that Hegel's object was 
to prevent the propagation and reception at the University 
of Berlin of any philosophy hostile to his own and akin to 
the doctrine of Schleiermacher and Fries." 6 Falckenberg, 
however, expressly concedes 7 that Hegel was "unfavorably 
disposed toward" Beneke, and there seems to have been 
good ground for Beneke's belief. For that the opposition 
to him did not originate with the government, but had its 
source within the University, appears evidenced by the fact 
that Minister Von Altenstein, in his first letter to Beneke, 
tried to shift at least the complete explanation of the whole 
matter upon the shoulders of the University authorities, 
to whom Beneke was referred for " further explanation." 8 
More than that, at the time when Beneke first received notice 
that his lectures were prohibited, and sought out the author- 
ities for some cause, " A person somewhat important at the 
time," says Dr. Schmidt, 9 "who was approached by Beneke's 
anxious relatives for advice and help in behalf of the young 
man, whose whole career seemed blighted by the exclusion, 
advised them in confidence that he should, howsoever sour 
it might be for him, teach the Hegelian philosophy for a few 
years for appearance sake, so that later, when his place 

6 History of Philosophy (Jr. by Morris, New York, 1888), Vol. II, p. 283. 

7 History of Modern Philosophy, p. 510. 

8 For this letter in full see Padagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, p. 10. 
3 Ibid., pp. 8-9. 



287] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE 2 \ 

seemed assured, he might gradually bend around again to 
his own system." One is not surprised to find Dr. Schmidt 
adding that Beneke " rejected this proposition with scorn." 
For he was more bent on ultimate truth than on the propa- 
gation of any system as system, even his own. 

That the real source of the opposition to his lecturing was 
Hegelian, Beneke finally, after many written remonstrances, 
succeeded in wringing from Minister von Altenstein himself. 
" The Minister himself," says Dr. Schmidt, " repeatedly ex- 
plained to Beneke in person that : ' No single proposition of 
his philosophy had given offence, but the whole of it; a 
philosophy which did not deduce everything from the abso- 
lute, which did not explain everything in relation to the 
absolute, was in general no philosophy, and could not be 
tolerated as philosophy.'" 10 Beneke was unable to refrain 
from giving vent to his opposite convictions ; but his bold- 
ness in contradicting a philosophical doctrine supported by 
a Minister of State made matters only worse. 11 

Not satisfied with prohibiting his lectures at Berlin, Von 
Altenstein, " irritated," says Ueberweg, " by the further 
steps on the part of Beneke, found means to force the Saxon 
government, which had designated him for a regular profes- 
sorship of Philosophy, not to appoint to that position a pri- 
vat docent, from whom, although politically unsuspected, in 
Prussia the Venia legendi had been withdrawn. 12 The full 

10 Pddagogisches Jakrbuck, p 12. 

11 It is a matter of historical interest to compare this governmental aid to the 
Hegelian system with the return service of that system to the Government. On 
this point the judgment of Schwegler is interesting. In his Handbook of the His- 
tory of Philosophy (tr. by Stirling, Edinburgh), speaking of Hegel after his call to 
Berlin, he says (p. 322), "Here too, he acquired from his connexion with the 
Prussian bureaucracy, as well politcal influence for himself, as the credit for his 
system of a State -philosophy : not always to the advantage of the inner freedom 0/ 
his philosophy, or of its moral worth" 

12 History, Vol. II, p. 283. 



22 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [ 2 88 

details of this persecution of Beneke are given by Dr. 
Schmidt in the biographical notice already referred to. It 
appears that the authorities at the University of Jena had 
already set their eyes on Beneke for a full professorship, and 
in November, 1822, wrote to Von Altenstein, asking whether 
a professorship in their University might be transferred to 
him. Beneke learned of the matter first in March, 1823. 
He then received a letter from General Superintendent Rohr, 
informing him of the affair, and saying that up to that time 
no answer had been received from the Minister. 

The Saxon government had been forced to make this ap- 
plication to the government at Berlin, because of what Ue- 
berweg calls the " forced interpretation" of " certain illiberal 
resolutions of the German Confederation." Ueberweg speaks 
as though this interpretation was made by Von Altenstein, 
although Dr. Schmidt says that it had been rendered to 
Rohr by " a person high in authority in Weimar." 13 This 
person had said to Rohr : " I should be very willing to help 
our Jena, and consequently Dr. Beneke ; only I do not see 
how this is possible, as long as the anathema in Berlin is not 
withdrawn, or at least is not mitigated to us by an explana- 
tion. The prohibition of a privat docent to teach is the same 
as the removal of an officially appointed professor. We 
must assume — this much one goverment owes to another — 
that the royal Prussian government has acted for a cause, 
and in a legitimate way. And now, there is the familiar res- 
olution of the Diet, steadfast adherence to which His Royal 
Highness the Grand Duke imposed upon us as our duty from 
the moment when it was settled as a resolution and a law of 
the Confederation. As usually the last, here the first word 
decides: 'An excluded teacher may not be reinstated by an- 
other confederated state in any public institution of learn- 
ing.' 'Ita lex scripta est' " There was therefore nothing for 

n Pddagogisckes Jahrbuch^. 12. 



289] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE 2 $ 

the authorities at Jena to do but first get permission of Von 
Altenstein to bring Beneke to Weimar. But their letter 
containing this request that honorable Minister had seen fit 
to ignore. 

Shortly after the receipt of Superintendent Rohr's letter, 
Beneke applied to Minister Von Altenstein for a testimonial 
showing that there was no accusation against him which pre- 
vented his taking a situation abroad. Von Altenstein re- 
plied promptly, but this is what he said : " In reply to your 
memorial of the 5th inst, I hereby inform you that, al- 
though I have found myself obliged to prohibit entirely the 
continuance of your philosophical lectures at the University 
of this place, partly because, in consequence of your writings 
becoming known to me, in general I was not able to have 
confidence in the maturity of your insight, a thing which 
should distinguish the teacher of a philosophical discipline, 
partly because in particular I was obliged to criticize in you 
an onesidedness of consideration, which could easily have 
influenced to their great disadvantage young men who were 
to be introduced to the study of philosophy by you, — still, 
in other respects, I have found not the least thing to object 
either against your conduct or your sentiments." 11 

Of course such a " testimonial" not only absolutely pre- 
vented Beneke from getting the position at Jena, but tended 
to do him positive harm. 

It is interesting to note, however, that this ministerial 
opinion was not shared at Jena. Von Altenstein had been 
so outspoken in his opinion that of course there was no al- 
ternative for the Saxon government; but Rohr, in a letter 
to Beneke, made very -plain the feeling of disappointment at 
Jena over the outcome of the negotiations. In this letter, 
dated September 16, he further said: " Had not the minis- 
terial testimonial given to you expressly said your philoso- 

14 Pddagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, p. 13. 



24 FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [290 

phy could easily influence to their detriment young students, 
one would perhaps easily have decided in your favor ; but 
such decided suspicions, necessarily, in consideration of the 
circumstances, caused the better private convictions of our 
Ministry, which were grounded on your writings, to remain 
silent." 15 I have italicised some of the last few words to em- 
phasize how Beneke's thought, considered in itself, was re- 
garded by others. 

Since, in very consequence of this deliberate and resolute 
attempt to stifle his philosophy, Beneke desired only the 
more to continue as a University teacher, he finally, in the 
beginning of the year 1824, repaired to Gottingen, where he 
remained for three years. Here his system grew rapidly 
under his facile pen, and as a result of his activity during 
this period, 16 we have two of his best works, the " Psycholo- 
gical Sketches," {Psychologische Skizzen), 11 in two volumes, 
and the " Relation of Soul and Body" {Das Verh'dltniss von 
Seele und Leib) . 

Dressier speaks in the highest praise of the Skizzen. He 
says : " These are no mere outlines of psychological science, 
but in them this knowledge is presented in complete detail, 
and one finds here a richness of psychological observation 
such as only a Beneke can supply. No nation has a like 
work which can bear comparison with it, and it is not too 
much to assert that in it we have the discovery of an entirely 
new world (the discovery of the inner world). What the 
feelings truly are, wherein they differ from the other activi- 
ties of the soul, no one before Beneke's time was able to de- 

lh Pddagogisches Jahrbuch, p. 14. 

16 Before going to Gottingen, and while he was waiting for the removal of the 
dark cloud overhanging him, Beneke put forth two other works: "An Apol- 
ogy for my Groundwork of the Physics of Morals;" and "Contributions to a 
purely Psychological Theory of Psychological Pathology." 

17 These two volumes were first published separately under different titles. 



2 9 1 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 2 5 

termine; further, how consciousness arises, changes and 
raises itself to higher forms, likewise was first proven agree- 
able to nature by him * * ." 18 

Early in 1827 Beneke was given permission to resume his 
lectures at Berlin. " Whether," says Schmidt, " the latter 
(his system) had now gained authority alongside of others 
also in Berlin, or Beneke's significance itself had become 
more recognized, or one thought to make good to Beneke 
the neglect occasioned through misunderstanding — whatever 
it was, it happened that his earlier relations with the Univer- 
sity of Berlin were restored, when, at Easter, 1827, he re- 
turned to Berlin, where his presence at that time was required 
by family circumstances." 19 

Beneke's later life in Berlin will be considered in the next 
chapter. 

18 Kurze Charakteristik der Sammtlichen Werke Beneke's, p. 294. Given as 
an appendix to the fourth edition of Beneke's lehrbuck, Berlin, 1877. 

19 Padagogisches Jahrbuch, p. 15. 



CHAPTER II 

Life Activity at Berlin 

WITH his return to the University of Berlin in 1827, 
Beneke began a long active career, which lasted till his death 
in 1854. In treating of this period I shall speak of his intel- 
lectual development, of his life effort and literary activity, 
and finally, of his character. 

I INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT 

I. Formative Philosophical Influence — It is a matter of 
interest both to inquire the nature of the intellectual equip- 
ment with which Beneke began his renewed career at Berlin 
and to indicate the lines of his philosophical development. 
The early writings of Beneke themselves bear ample testi- 
mony to the formative influences at work upon the prom- 
ising young philosopher ; but, if it were needed, we have the 
personal testimony of Beneke himself. In later years some 
German critics, especially Drobisch, 1 savagely attacked the 
character of Beneke, claiming that he was little more than a 
Herbartian pure and simple ; that he had sought to give the 
appearance of originality to his system more through new 
terms than new ideas ; and that he had given himself a good 
deal of uncalled-for trouble in trying to differentiate himself 
from Herbart. Beneke, in a valuable comparison of his own 
psychology with that of Herbart, 2 took occasion in a histor- 

1 See Die Neue Psychologie, pp. 76-77. 

2 Ibid. Dritter Aufsatz : " Ueber das Verhaltniss meiner Psychologie zur Her- 
bart 'schen" pp. 76-144. 

26 [292 



293] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE 27 

ical preliminary to answer the unfounded charge against 
both his character and his system. 

So far as the influence of Herbart on Beneke is concerned, 
to see its lack one has only to recall the inherent character 
of his earliest three writings, to the fundamental principles 
of which Beneke, as he himself claimed, remained true 
throughout his whole career. These principles were indeed 
so opposed in method to that of Herbart that the " empiri- 
cism " of Beneke was in his early days the very ground of 
his being regarded a resolute opponent both of Herbart and 
of the speculative or metaphysical method for which he 
stood. It is true that Beneke later read with grateful appre- 
ciation Herbart's works, with some conclusions of which his 
own results in part coincided. But the germs of his devel- 
oped system were already almost all clearly indicated in the 
works mentioned, and at the time of writing these Beneke 
knew little or nothing of Herbart's philosophy. On this 
point Beneke has left an interesting record. He says : " In 
the time of my real mental formation, in the time when my 
previously thoroughly fleeting and changing spirit began to 
assume a definitely fixed form and build up the fundamental 
tendencies which it afterwards for the most part followed 
throughout my whole life almost unchanged, Herbart was 
entirely unknown to me. I had made, in addition to the 
admirable English philosophers, German philosophical in- 
vestigators, particularly Kant, Jacobi, Fries (at the sug- 
gestion of De Wette), Platner and Garve, the object of 
laborious study. The influence of all these, in my first three 
writings, in the ' Theory of Knowledge,' ' Empirical Psy- 
chology,' and 'Doctor's Dissertation,' is not to be mis- 
taken ; of any influence of Herbart not a trace is found. * * * 
Of course there are to be found already in these incomplete 
youthful essays various traces of what the direction of my 
psychological investigations made common to me and to 



28 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [294 

Herbart, e. g., of the polemic against innate abstract psy- 
chical powers. But how differently is this grounded, and 
how differently carried out! Compare especially pages 54- 
73 of the ' Empirical Psychology/ The rejection of the 
previous theory and the definition of what is to be put in the 
place of it was accomplished inductively, on the basis of a 
comparison of the products of inner observation, without the 
slightest intermixture of speculative foundations." 3 

The more positive influences on his early development 
Beneke has set forth in the passage just quoted. Perhaps a 
word further deserves to be said of the influence of English 
thought upon him. He had a complete mastery of the Eng- 
lish tongue ; corresponded in English with many English 
philosophers and educationalists, among them Sir William 
Hamilton and Dr. Arnold of Rugby; and his works are a 
lasting monument to his extended scholarship not only in 
English philosophy 4 but in English literature as well. To 
mention all the philosophical works with which he showed 
personal acquaintance would be to enumerate about all the 
English philosophers from Bacon and Locke down to John 
Stuart Mill. His writings show that he was perhaps more 
directly influenced by Locke and Hume, and by the con- 
temporary Scottish philosophers, in whose works, especially 
those of Brown and Stewart, he took a keen critical interest. 

2. Relation to Kant — (a) The connecting clue to the 

? Die Neue Psychologie, pp. 80-81. On this point compare also Ueberweg, Vol. 
II, p. 282. — "Not until his first three works (Outlines of the Science of Cogni- 
tion, Empirical Psychology as the Basis of all Knowledge, and De veris philoso- 
phies iniliis, his Doctor's Dissertation) had already appeared (in 1820) did he 
become acquainted with one of Herbart's works; that work was the second edi- 
tion of the Introduction to Philosophy (1821); until then he had possessed only 
a superficial knowledge (acquired perhaps through Stiedenroth's Theorie des 
Wissens, Gottingen, 1819,) of Herbart's views." 

* See an interesting sketch by Beneke of the contemporary philosophical stand- 
point in England in Die Neue Psychologies pp. 300-336. 



295] FRIEDRl CH ED UARD BEN EKE 2 9 

philosophical development of Beneke during the days of his 
activity at Berlin is the philosophy of Kant. Of this system 
Beneke from the outset showed himself a keen critic. And 
in no point keener than in his discussions of the " internal 
sense " and of the employment of the a priori method. His 
attitude towards Kant in these respects, however, will be con- 
sidered with more detail in the subsequent exposition of his 
philosophy. 

(b) There is one point, however, in respect to Beneke's 
relation to Kant, that calls for special emphasis. The his- 
torical importance of Beneke as the real pioneer of "the 
movement back to Kant," has never been sufficiently recog- 
nized, or more than that, it has not been recognized at all. 5 
While Beneke, single handed, spent much of his effort in re- 
futing Kant, and especially the a priori method as it was 
afterwards developed in the philosophies of Fichte, Schelling 
and Hegel, nevertheless, for him, in the Kantian system was 
to be found the true foundation and starting point for philos- 

5 Falckenberg, in his History, p. 589, speaking of the more modern " movement 
back to Kant," says : " The Kantian philosophy has created two epochs : one at 
the time of its appearance, and the second two generations after the death of its 
author. The new Kantian movement, which is one of the most prominent char- 
acteristics of the philosophy of the present time, took its beginnings a quarter of 
a century ago. It is true that even before 1865 individual thinkers like Ernst 
Reinhold of Jena (died 1855), the admirer of Fries, J. B. Meyer, of Bonn, K. G. 
von Reichlin-M eld egg, and others, had sought a point of departure for their 
views in Kant; that K. Fischer's work on Kant, i860, had given a lively impulse to 
the renewed study of the critical philosophy; nay, that the cry, "Back to Kant," 
had been expressly raised by Fortlage (as early as 1832, in his treatise, The Gaps 
in the Hegelian System) , and by Zeller." 

Falckenberg thus, while tracing the movement even so far back as to Fortlage, 
ignores Beneke. But the real " opening gun" of this movement was Beneke's 
little Kantian Memorial, in celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Critique 
of Pure Reason, While the imprint of the book is 1832, as the prefatory note 
shows, it had been written and finished before November, 1831. Fortlage, more- 
over, who had been one of Beneke's students, and was an ardent admirer of him 
and his system, doubtless had imbibed many of his views on this point. 



30 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [296 

ophy. In a little book, 6 which has deserved a better fate at 
the hands of historians of German philosophy, and which is 
perhaps destined to become of permanent historical value 7 
for its picture of the philosophical situation of the times, he 
expressly advocates the need of a return to a criticised 
Kantian basis, and indeed towards this end much of his life's 
activity was directed. Beneke's express statement is con- 
tained in the closing paragraph of the introduction, in which 
he pictures the condition of a philosophical Germany be- 
come, in the terms of Sir James Mackintosh, " metaphysi- 
cally mad." He says : "It is also high time that we became 
conscious of the confusion which for so long a time now has 
prevailed with the highest and most venerated among us, 
under the pretext of representing the inner being of all 
things in their purest truth. If we do not wish to expose 
ourselves to the danger of having the sore, which has been 
healed on the one side, break out again on the other in only 
more perilous form, we must direct our criticism not to the 
daughter and granddaughter philosophies, but to the Kantian 
philosophy itself, in order where possible to lay bare the very 
root of the evil in this, and to stop at the source the stream 
which threatens to inundate Germany with an intellectual 
barbarism." 8 

6 Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit. Eine Jubeldenkschrift 
auf die Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Berlin, 1832. 

7 An interesting confirmation of the judgment here expressed is to be found in 
Bergmann's Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin, 1893). Bergmann in his article 
on Beneke has palpably and expressly made valuable use of the Kant Memorial. 
It may be scarcely necessary to repeat (see Introductory NoteJ that the present 
work was planned and completely written entirely without any knowledge of 
Bergmann's History, which only fell into the writer's hands as the work is going 
to press. 

8 Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe, p. 11. 



297] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE ^i 

II LIFE EFFORT AND LITERARY ACTIVITY 
I . Opposition to the Philosophical Tendencies of the Times 
— Beneke's little memorial on "Kant and the Philosophical 
Problem of our Time," has a peculiar significance, because 
it is indicative of what was really his life effort — a profound 
critical opposition to the philosophical tendencies of the 
times. This opposition was not one directed against either 
an individual or individuals ; it was an earnest and serious 
effort to bring back the German mind to the narrow path of 
truth, from which in Beneke's view it was sadly erring. In 
pursuance of this object, Beneke had issued the book above 
mentioned, the second but most important work issued by 
him after his return to Berlin. In this book, which was in- 
tended as a commemoration of the semi-centennial of Kant's 
Critique of Pure Reason, first issued in 1781, he set forth in 
no uncertain terms his attitude towards the prevailing ten- 
dencies. The purpose of the Kantian Memorial was three- 
fold : 1. To examine the fundamental tendencies of the 
Kantian Critique, and discover the inherent reasons for its 
failure to accomplish its avowed purpose; 2. To show in 
general outline the character of the later German systems as 
conditioned on the Kantian point of view; 3. To glance at 
the future outlook. 

Beneke is very severe in his denunciation of the purely 
metaphysical character of the later German systems. He 
says: "When Fichte regards the Ego as going out of itself 
in an unending activity, as setting before it a barrier or the 
Non-ego, and returning from this to itself, what else have 
we here but a metaphor? — for in no proper sense can we pos- 
sibly assign to an entirely non-spatial spirit such movements 
in space. When later the Schellingian school talk of the 
poles of the absolute, of the disuniting of these, of a decay- 
ing of ideas ; or Hegel speaks of the going forth from itself 
of the abstract to its non-being, and of a return of the same 



32 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [298 

into itself; these are all symbols which it can enter into the 
minds of no one to apply as truly scientific predicates, from 
the construction of which a true conception of scientific 
knowledge can be gained." 9 

Beneke too is very summary in his rejection of the view, 
then very prevalent, that German philosophy was to be re- 
garded as a systematic development ending with Hegel. The 
claims of the later systems to a Kantian foundation were re- 
garded by him as utterly false. " We have, it is asserted," 
he says, "not merely philosophical systems, such as no 
other people have, but also a systematic evolution of philoso- 
phy itself irom Kant to Schelling and Hegel; and so perhaps 
must the same fundamental ideas return ever in new form. 
A fine repetition of our systems is the systematic develop- 
ment of our philosophy ! Does it call itself the follower of 
Kant? Does it assert that it is his spirit that suggests its 
speculation to it? Nothing could be more desirable than 
that people should once for all give a clear account of pre- 
cisely what they understand by this. Kant taught on every 
page that only on the foundations of experience could true 
knowledge, knowledge of reality, be acquired ; whereas it 
pushes the knowledge gained through experience con- 
temptuously into the background, in order to possess a far 
higher kind of knowledge in the pure imagination, and in its 
chimercal process of construction. Kant is ever coming 
back to this point, that out of mere concepts no knowledge 
of the existing is possible, that all speculative reasoning 
leads only to chimeras, that the suprasensible can never for 
us men become the object of intuition or of contemplation, 
can never be known by us, but only comprehended through 
moral faith ; whereas this derides faith in the suprasensible 
as a minor accomplishment belonging to the spirit; and 
their whole philosophy is from beginning to end a theory of 

9 Kant und die Philosophische Atifgabe, pp. 41-42. 



2Q9] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE 33 

the suprasensible, which it asserts itself to be able to know- 
in its inner being ; and therefore it employs itself also with 
speculation, which Kant, as being unattainable for all time to 
the human spirit, wished to have banished from all philoso- 
phy. Kant, although he was called back by them, made, as 
did Socrates and his school, morality the central point of all 
philosophy ; whereas it has so placed morality in the shade 
that people have rightly doubted whether perhaps it could 
be introduced in the construction of their phisolophical sys- 
tems, except as a most unpardonable inconsistency. Such a 
system then is in the fullest opposition to Kant." 10 

Almost before the ink was dry on the manuscript pages of 
the book just quoted, Hegel died. This was on November 
14, 1 83 1. Beneke was a man of too much character to incur 
even the suspicion that his book had been immediately writ- 
ten as a vindictive stab at the dead Hegel. Undoubtedly, 
therefore, it is Hegel's death to which he refers in the follow- 
ing short prefatory note to the volume : " In order to avoid 
all misinterpretation, I may remark that the present volume 
by no means first originated in consequence of recent events, 
but already in August of this year was ready for publication, 
but this was prevented at that time by the outbreak of cholera 
in our ( state. As for the rest, the book speaks for itself." 11 

Lectures and Writings — It certainly is significant of the 
chief source of opposition to Beneke that in a very short time 
after Hegel's death, i. e., in 1832, he was appointed a pro- 
fessor extraordinarily (although not till nine years after did 
he receive any salary). 12 While the keen edge of the oppo- 

10 Ibid, pp. 83-84. u Ibid. Vorer inner ung. 

12 Compare the remarks of "Dr. Schmidt, Pddagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, p. 15. 
So lasting, however, was the Hegelian opposition, that a petition to make Beneke 
a regular professor, signed by over 800 members of a schoolmasters' convention, 
held in Dresden in 1848, and some 200 others, gotten up unknown to Beneke by 
Dressier, and sent by him to Minister Rodbertus at Berlin, proved, notwithstand- 
ing Beneke's twenty-one years of continuous and unremitting service, unsuccessful. 
Cf. Dressler's article, Pddagogisches Jahrbuch, pp. 31-32. 



34 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [300 

sition to him was thus removed, nevertheless throughout the 
rest of his career he was overshadowed by the accredited 
Hegelian system, and there is something almost pathetic in 
the way in which, in his lectures and writings, he endeavored, 
single-handed and alone, to stem the overwhelming current 
of the prevailing philosophical speculation. 

Dressier has left an interesting note regarding Beneke's 
lectures, which, on his first . personal acquaintance with 
Beneke in 1841, he attended. "He had very attentive 
hearers," he says, " but their number was small ; in the year 
1 841, and following, only what proceeded from Hegel had 
any influence, and he often had to undergo the experience 
of having advanced students leave him, after one lecture to 
which they had listened, with the remark : ' That indeed is 
nothing more than sound common sense.' Since the stu- 
dents knew on whom they would be examined, on whom 
not, who had influence for their promotion, and who not, 
whose philosophy was thought proper high up, whose was 
put down with a black mark, they did what accorded with 
their worldly interest, and the teacher whom they much 
more willingly would have listened to they left almost de- 
serted. When it is known what a wretched delivery many 
professors had whose lecture rooms nevertheless were always 
filled, Beneke seems like a true martyr." l3 

Beneke's writings are by no means merely destructive 
criticism. They offer in the place of that which they attempt 
to destroy positive constructive work. I shall not attempt 
to enumerate here all of even the important works which 
Beneke put forth during this period. He had the usual vol- 
uminousness of all the German philosophical writers, and 
there is a certain profusion and repetition about a good deal 
of his writing, due to the fact that his whole system centered 
about his fundamental psychological principles, which thus 

13 Dressier, Padagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, pp. 25-26. 



3 o I ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 3 - 

in each work receive new statement and application. The 
central work of all Beneke's writings is the Lehrbuch der 
Psychologie als Naturwissenschaft, first published in 1833. 
The permanent value of this book may be inferred from the 
fact that it has reached four editions, 14 two after the death of 
Beneke. It is the central work, because, as Dressier says, 
" it presents with the greatest precision the principles of the 
new psychology," and because, we may add, the new 
psychology was the fundamental basis of Beneke's whole 
system. Die neae Psychologie {Erlaittemde Aufs'dtze zur 
Zweiten Atiflage meines Lehrbuchs der Psychologie als Natur- 
wissenschaft, Berlin, 1845), 1S important for its further eluci- 
dation of Beneke's psychological principles, and also for the 
comparison with Herbart, already alluded to. 

Beneke's metaphysical standpoint is to be found in part in 
almost all his writings, but his complete views are gathered 
together in the System der Metaphysik und der Religions 
Philosophic, aus den naturlichen Grundverhdltnissen des 
menschlichen Geistes abgeleitet, Berlin, 1 840. 

The most important applications of his system are 
to be found in his Erziehnngs und Unterrichtslehre, two 
volumes, the third edition of which was edited by Dress- 
ier in 1864; and in the " Grundlinien des naturlichen Sys- 
temes der praktischen Philosophic" The latter consisted of 
three volumes: I. General Ethics; II. Special Ethics; III. 
The Outlines of Natural Law, of Politics, and of the Philoso- 
phy of Criminal Law. Dressier says Beneke regarded his 
Ethics as his most successful work. One other most in- 
fluential application of his system was the " System der Logik 
als Kuntslehre des Denkens" Berlin, 1842. This was on the 
basis of the Lehrbuch der Logik, which Beneke issued in 
1832, and in which he had already anticipated by a number 

14 Second edition, 1845; 3 d ed -> 1861; 4th ed., Berlin, 1877, edited and with 
an appendix characterizing Beneke's whole works, by Johann Gottlieb Dressier. 



36 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [302 

of years the new logical theories over the discovery of which 
Sir William Hamilton and de Morgan got into controversy. 15 

Ill CHARACTER 

Throughout the whole trying period of his life activity at 
Berlin, the character of Beneke stands out in shining relief. 
Pure and manly in his life, loving and affectionate among his 
intimates, faithful and strong in his friendships, forbearing 
towards his enemies, zealous for the truth, he won the love 
and admiration of all who came in close contact with him. 

It is interesting to compare the loving tributes of his 
friends on these points. Diesterweg in his tribute says : "As 
a man he was what the ancients called an anitna Candida 
(a pure soul) ; I believe that he went forth from this world 
as unspotted as a pure girl." 16 Schmidt says : " That he felt 
and lived in the spirit of Christianity, he showed in the fact 
that he forgave his enemies, defended his antagonists, and 
where necessity demanded, hastened to bring consolation 
and assistance." " Dittes, in a letter to Dressier, ls speaks of 
his " frank rejection of what was untenable ; his friendly re- 
cognition of success ; his earnestness in the apprehension of 
life, and his affectionate interest in my whole being, inner 
and outer." Fortlage, in the course of a long and glowing 
tribute, says : 

"There still rings in my ears the sound of the melodious 
and gentle voice with which he always in his lectures, with- 
out passion or violence, answered even the most irritating 
invectives against his assertions. The ability to attach him- 
self to others, or to form a coterie about him, was as foreign 
and unintelligible to him as personal enmity. Moreover, he 
knew very well his separate and forlorn position among the 
scientific factions, but he stuck by it with the most tenacious, 

15 See Dressler's Kurze Charaktertstik, appended to the fourth edition of 
Beneke's Lehrbuch der Psychologie, p. 299. 

16 Padagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, p. I. 17 Ibid., p. 19. 1S Ibid., p. 23. 



303] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 3 j 

yet mildest pertinacity, so that in very truth he broke his 
path through no other means than those of his own single 
self. * * * Slight and public neglect, which usually in 
others has aroused rage and resentment, died away in his 
harmonious soul with a feeling of sorrow for the blind fas- 
cination with which his age still shut itself up entirely from 
a knowledge, in the perfecting of which mankind still has to 
await the most preferable remedy for its wounds and infirm- 
ities. But although no feeling of wrath ever secured a place 
in his soul, still any yielding to fate or placability towards 
the ruling intellectual tendencies was just as little known 
to it." 19 

To sum it up in the words of Dressier: " One of the most 
prominent traits of his noble character was his great forbear- 
ance towards his often malicious opponents, to whom he 
occasioned more disquiet than perhaps was exactly agreea- 
ble, and I could furnish several authentic proofs on this point 
if higher considerations did not preclude this. Not that he 
did not feel deeply the injustice done him, but his lofty spirit, 
his pure soul, soon raised him again above the pain and 
taught him to laugh at the apparent triumph of the world." 20 

Beneke met his death in a mysterious way. On March 
1, 1854, he suddenly disappeared. His brother (with whom, 
since he never married, he lived in Berlin), Diesterweg, and 
other friends, made most protracted searches for him, but to 
no avail. He had suffered much in recent years from 
insomnia, and it was finally believed that he had wandered 
off and taken his own life. Not until June, 1856, was his 
body recovered. It was then found in the canal near Char- 
lottenburg by some workmen. The exact time and manner 
of his death ever remained a mystery. 

19 Fortlage, Acht Psychologische Vortrage : Fierter Vortrag, " Ueber den Char- 
akter" Jena, 1872, pp. 170-172. 

"^Padagogisches Jahrbuch, 1856, p. 32. 



Part II 



THE PHILOSOPHY 



CHAPTER I 

Historical Basis and Theory of Knowledge 

§ i. General Introduction — The exposition of Beneke's 
philosophical system which follows, being intended rather as 
an introduction to the further study of Beneke, concerns 
itself more particularly with the foundation principles. These 
principles, as has already been pointed out, are to be found 
in completest statement in the Lehrbuch der Psychologie, 
which, therefore, is made the basis of the text. Where, how- 
ever, for the fuller elucidation of various parts of the system, 
it has seemed necessary, further reference has been made to 
Beneke's other works, duly indicated in the foot-notes. A 
comparison of the text following with that of the Lehrbuch 
will show that while Beneke's form of statement in many 
particular paragraphs has been closely followed, the general 
method of exposition has been radically different. The 
Lehrbuch, being practically a compendium of the whole sys- 
tem, necessarily fails, by its dogmatic deductive method, to 
preserve the inherent coerciveness of the fundamental theory. 
The attempt, therefore, has been made, by a more inductive 
statement, to minimize the apparent arbitrariness of some of 
38 [304 



305] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 3 g 

the fundamental conclusions. It is hoped that this plan may 
thus help to reveal something of the true significance of 
Beneke's thinking in the development of German idealism. 

Among the Germans, Beneke's significance has been 
largely psychological, but psychological in the sense of im- 
mediate applicability to pedagogics. His chief following, 
therefore, has been among the school-masters of Germany, 
and the superior value of his psychology, in its pedagogical, 
logical and ethical applications, has made this psychology 
not only a formidable rival of, but in high educational 
circles, preferable to the Herbartian. 1 For while possessing 
all the distinct psychological merits usually attributed to the 
Herbartian system, Beneke's psychology enjoys the addi- 
tional merit of an even profounder metaphysical basis, 
reached by a more satisfactory and tenable method. And 
indeed, since Beneke's real importance in this respect has 
never been recognized either in Germany or elsewhere, it is 
the metaphysical significance of his system that the follow- 
ing pages distinctly aim to bring out. 

In pursuance of the aim and plan indicated, the present 
chapter takes up the consideration of the historical basis of 
the system with the view of setting in a clear light its start- 
ing point. 

1 Diesterweg, who especially in his Pddagogisches yahrbuch, has exerted a 
powerful influence in the education of German teachers, and who for years was a 
leader of educational affairs in Berlin, was an ardent admirer and advocate of 
Beneke's system. In the course of his tribute to Beneke, in the Jahrbuch fiir 
1856 (p. 4), Diesterweg sums up the essence of German pedagogy in a sentence 
which deserves to be preseved, because it is the keynote of all pedagogics : " Who 
would educate and mould the human soul, must know it; who would educate and 
mould individuals, must possess the power to comprehend their individuality." I 
quote this to give force to the statement which almost immediately follows. After 
expressing the conviction that without rational psychology there can be no scien- 
tific pedagogics, he adds : " Inasmuch as in our estimation the Benekian psych- 
ology does more in these respects than any other, until that ' other ' appears, we 
shall hold fast to it, and recommend it for study to the teachers who feel the need 
of acting with a clear consciousness of what they are doing." 



40 FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [306 

I DOCTRINES OF PERCEPTION BEFORE KANT 

§ 2. Shortcomings of Earlier Doctrines of Perception — Not- 
withstanding the shortcomings of the doctrine of perception 
up to the time of Kant, from all this early analysis there 
comes a clear gain which shows itself in the recognition of 
all individual experience as a form of consciousness, and in 
the sharp distinction of this experience into two strikingly 
contrasted aspects — " external" consciousness and " inter- 
nal" consciousness. This distinction Hume attempted to 
indicate by the terms " impressions" and " ideas" ; Berkeley 
had recognized it in the terms " ideas of sensation" (also 
" real things") and "ideas proper" ; thus both Berkeley and 
Hume, although recognizing the conscious character of both 
impressions and ideas, attempted to rescue the word " idea" 
from the reprehensible use to which Locke had put it by 
making it do service for both things and thought. But val- 
uable as these distinctions undoubtedly are, they fall far short 
of a complete accounting for experience. The full import 
of the philosophical question which experience presses on us 
for solution, seems never to have completely dawned on the 
earlier English philosophers. Locke, it is true, recognized, 
although only in a descriptive way, the synthetic function or 
activity of mind in originating complex ideas, but he failed 
to see that a like activity was implied also in the so-called 
simple ideas or sensations ; as a result he never gets beyond 
the natural history of some particular idea to the fundamental 
question how an idea is at all possible. Berkeley, too, utterly 
failed to grasp the problem involved in perception. For him, 
" things," while existing in the mental realm of the given 
perceiving individual, were " mere aggregations of sensa- 
tions." " Thus, for example," he says, 2 " a certain color, 
taste, smell, figure and consistence having been observed to 

2 Principles of Human Knowledge, p. 36 (Fraser's Selections from Berkeley, 
Oxford, 1884). 



307] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE ^ T 

go together, are accounted one distinct thing, signified by the 
name of apple ; other collections of ideas constitute a stone, 
a tree, a book, and the like sensible things. But, as Professor 
Fraser, in commenting on the passage quoted, acutely re- 
marks: 3 "Is mere 'observation' enough to account for this 
synthesis, in which ideas or phenomena are aggregated, and 
thus converted into things V ' How such " collections of ideas" 
could take place at all without some such synthesis, is by 
Berkeley entirely overlooked. It is in Hume that this over- 
sight becomes completest. For to Hume, both the group- 
ings of conscious states called " things" or impressions, as 
well as the ideas which were supposed to be faint copies of 
the original impressions, did not possess even that small de- 
gree of unity or coherence which Berkeley at least implied 
for them by assigning them an existence within a spiritual sub- 
stance or soul. Individual experience, so far as it could be 
called individual, was to Hume " but a bundle or collection 
of different perceptions which succeed each other with incon- 
ceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and move- 
ment." 4 With this conception of experience as a mosaic of 
co-existent but fleeting discrete feelings, Hume brought the 
whole problem of perception to the sharpest issue. And it 
was the needed solution to this problem that Kant attempted 
to supply. 

II THE KANTIAN THEORY 
§ 3. General Character of the Problem as Presented to Kant 
— While the general character of the philosophical problem 
as it presented itself to the mind of Kant was thus already 
predetermined for him by English thinkers, it was also 
largely determined by the preceding metaphysical specula- 
tion on the continent. The Scylla and Charybdis through 
which Kant had to steer his philosophic course was really 

3 Ibid., p. 36, note. 

i Treatise of Human Nature, p. 252 (Ed. Selby-Bigge, Oxford, 1888). 



42 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [308 

on the one hand the skepticism of Hume, on the other, the 
rationalism of Wolf. 

As against Hume, the doctrine of Kant confirms all expe- 
rience as a form of consciousness or knowledge in a sense 
which shows the utter inadequacy of the psychological 
atomism of Hume to do service even as a description of 
experience such as we know it. Outer experience, on the 
one hand, it demonstrates is utterly unintelligible and even 
impossible as a " mere aggregate" of sensations. Unrelated 
feelings could never constitute or alone yield knowledge. 
Only so far as the manifold of sense is apprehended as a unit 
does experience in the sense of a perceptive consciousness 
become possible. Inner experience, on the other hand, is 
shown to be likewise impossible as a mere collection of ideas 
or abstractions from the perceptive consciousness. The 
essential characteristic of inner experience is that it too is the 
apprehension of the many as one, and this is only to say that 
the essential condition of the existence of every idea is the 
unifying activity necessarily implied in it. 

As against Wolf, the doctrine of Kant insisted on the im- 
possibility of reason, through mere explication of its alleged 
innate ideas, ever reaching metaphysical truth. Inner ex- 
perience, or the conceptive consciousness, since the days of 
Descartes, had been elevated to the position not merely of 
sole philosophical criterion, but of a criterion valid apart 
from all experience, so far as that word refers to external 
perceptions. Clearness of conception was for the Cartesians 
the test of truth, so that within the idea itself was implicitly 
contained the whole measure and content of truth. This 
doctrine and its concomitant one of innate ideas reached its 
climax in Wolf, who, for example, in his Logic (c. I, § 6,) 
says : 5 " Whether our notions of external things are conveyed 

5 Quoted by St. John. See his edition of Locke's Essay Concerning Human 
Understanding, p. 140, note. ( Works of John Locke, London, 1889). 



309] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE 43 

into the soul as into an empty receptacle, or whether rather 
they be not buried, as it were, in the essence of the soul, and 
are brought forth barely by his own powers, on occasion of 
the changes produced in our bodies by external objects, is a 
question at present foreign to this place. In my ' Thoughts 
on God and the Human Soul/ chap, v., I shall there only be 
able to show that the last opinion is the more agreeable to 
truth." 

Thus, then, as against the attempt of Hume to interpret 
experience as an empirical chaos of sense impressions, so 
against this effort of the traditional philosophy to evolve 
knowledge of reality from mere inner consciousness, Kant 
was obliged to revolt. 

§ 4. Aim of the Kantian Philosophy — The fundamental 
aim, therefore, of the Kantian philosophy, as Beneke points 
out, 6 was first a purely negative one. Its chief effort was 
spent in " thoroughly grounding and establishing this prop- 
osition : that through mere concepts no knowledge of an exist- 
ing thing is possible, nor is there possible any proof of the 
existence of the thing thought in this concept." Thus as 
against the traditional, philosophy, which out of mere con- 
cepts believed itself able to demonstrate the existence of its 
objects, and the inner nature of things, the existence of God, 
-etc., Kant urged the distinction between knowledge and mere 
thinking. " For mere thinking we have enough in our con- 
cept, but in this we acquire nothing but mere thought-forms, 
in order out of the given intuitions to make knowledge. 
Knowledge, on the contrary, in so far as it asserts an existence, 
is given only through the perception ( Wahmehmung) of 
that which exists." 7 Or to put Kant's opposition between 
the Understanding and Sense in his own words : " Der 

6 Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit, p. 12. 

7 Ibid, p. 13. 



44 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [ 3 1 

Versland vermag nichts anzuschauen, und die Sinne nichts 
zudenken. Nur damns, das sie sich vereinigen, kann Er- 
kentniss entspringen" * Or again: " Without sensibility no 
object would be given to us, without understanding none 
would be thought. Thoughts without content are empty,, 
perceptions without conceptions are blind." 9 

But this negative result, Beneke further points out, was 
reached by Kant only to pave the way for " two highly im- 
portant positive aims." First, to bring the ruling mental 
power, which by its method had lost itself in the unraveling 
of an insoluble metaphysical problem, back to experience, 
and thereby concentrate its energy on empirical knowledge 
(Erfahrungs-erkenntniss), which promises a richer and 
quicker progress. Second, " Kant wished ' to get rid of 
knowledge in order to make room for faith.' Since for us on 
knowledge of supra-sensible is possible, the belief in God, 
Immortality, and Freedom possesses certainty for us only as 
postulates of the Practical Reason." 10 

§ 5 . The Kantian Theory of Knowledge as stated by Beneke 
— Beneke thus had a clear conception of the aim of the 
Kantian philosophy, and he states its theory of knowledge 
thus: — " According to Kant's oft repeated statements we 
must look upon all human knowledge as a product: as a 
product, on the one side, of the material of knowledge, or of 
sensuous impressions furnished by the object ; on the other, 
of the forms arising from the knowing subject, which forms 
again are twofold, — the pure forms of intuition of space and 
time, and the pure forms of the understanding, or categories. 
It is in virtue of the first named factors that our knowledge 
finds its truly objective foundation : for through sense im- 
pressions is something supplied to it from the object; but 

8 Quoted by Beneke, ibid., p. 13. 

9 Watson's Selections from Kant, p. 41 (Glasgow, I 

10 Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe, p. 17. 



3 I I ] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE 45 

still we do not apprehend the objects as they are in and for 
themselves independent of our perceptions of them, but only 
in relation to our faculty of knowledge, or (in other words) 
as they appear to us (i. e. as phenomena). To phenomena 
we are limited in all our knowledge : for indeed we are in no 
manner able to resolve this product into its simple factors ; 
and the object in itself consequently remains for us neces- 
rarily a thing absolutely unknown, and of which we can only 
surmise, not assert anything absolutely. According to 
Kant's oft repeated explanations, this holds just as true of 
the existence of our own soul, as of the existence of outer 
being. * * * * Even ourselves consequently we know 
only as phenomena; and the being of our own soul, how it 
exists in and for itself and independent of this way of know- 
ing it, for us remains forever entirely unknown. 11 

§ 6. The Kantian Distinction of Knowledge Independent of 
Experience — To understand Beneke's criticism of the theory 
of knowledge just stated, it is necessary first to get clear 
Kant's pseudo-distinction of knowledge independent of ex- 
perience. With the English introspectionists Kant recog- 
nized all experience as a mode of knowledge implying in- 
telligence. But he differed from Locke, Berkeley and 
Hume, in seeing that this intelligence " has a rule of its own, 
which must be an a priori condition of all knowledge of ob- 
jects presented to it." 12 The perceptive consciousness, then, 
is not, as Locke and Berkeley maintained, mere groupings of 
simple sensations or collections of ideas ; nor as Hume, a 
mere chaos of disconnected separate sense phenomena ; it is 
an indeterminate manifold which has been brought under the 
unity of certain determinate relations. " Perception," says 
Kant, " can become knowledge only if it is related in some 
way to the object which it determines." Perception, then, is 

11 Ibid., pp. 26-27. 
12 Watson's Selections from Kant, p. 4. 



46 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [ 3 r 2 

really the determination of an object, and this determination 
becomes effected through conceptions. Only then in so far 
as objects, not actually present to consciousness (whatever 
we may mean by such so-called " objects"), "conform to the 
constitution of our faculty of perception," 13 can they enter 
the conscious plane or become knowledge for us. Objects 
of experience, then, and by these Kant seems to mean ob- 
jects within the perceptive consciousness (objects of outer 
experience), are to be taken in two distinct senses, — "on 
the one hand, as a phenomenon, and on the other hand, as a 
thing in itself." Criticism establishes our unavoidable ignor- 
ance of things in themselves, and limits all we can know to 
mere phenomena. 

But since experience, inner or outer, is a form of con- 
sciousness, and so of knowledge, and since knowledge, it is 
alleged, is a product of two factors, it is surprising to find 
Kant, on the basis so far outlined, raising in the Critique of 
Pure Reason the question, " as a question which cannot be 
lightly put aside," " whether there is any knowledge that is 
independent of experience, and even of all impressions of 
sense." 14 If experience, consciousness, is made up of two 
elements, sense material and mental form, what can it mean 
to inquire concerning knowledge " absolutely independent of 
all experience?" It must mean either of two things: 1st. 
Is there any knowledge that is not a product of two factors? 
or, 2nd. Is there any knowledge of which one of the factors 
is not sense material? To emphasize this point is to bring 
into clear light a most important confusion which results 
from Kant's juggle with the word " experience." The word 
experience, so far as that word is intended to mean knowl- 
edge of the existence of an object, is limited again and again 
by Kant to the perceptive consciousness (outer experience). 
The conceptive or purely subjective consciousness (inner 

13 Ibid., p. 3. "Ibid., p. 8. 



g 1 3 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE 47 

experience) is recognized by him only far enough to show 
its impotency to yield knowledge of the existence of things 
in themselves (Dingen-an-sich), or of the thing thought 
(Noumenon). But without deciding at the moment, whether 
in external sense perception we get at the existence of the 
thing known, whereas (as Kant contends), in internal sense 
perception, we do not, this much at least we may insist on, 
that, regardless of the content or meaning — regardless of the 
existence or non-existence of that to which they refer — the 
facts of inner experience (memories, imaginations, concepts), 
as psychical existences, are just as much parts of or data of 
the individual experience as any of the sense perceptions of 
outer experience. 

§ 7. Beneke' s Criticism of the Kantian Theory of Knowl- 
edge — It is the recognition of this confusion in Kant's use of 
the word experience, in the sense of knowledge of existence, 
that constitutes the basis of Beneke's criticism of his theory. 
Beneke insists on the inherent contradiction of Kant's gen- 
eral position. This contradiction lay on the one hand in 
regarding knowledge, perceptive and conceptive, as phe- 
nomenalistic, and yet pretending to a knowledge of the fac- 
tors by which it was produced. If knowledge is to be re- 
garded as mere appearance, as a product of two factors, the 
sense material and the forms of the understanding, then for 
the strictly logical Kantian, the latter must remain as un- 
knowable as the former. Or, as Beneke puts it : " The pure 
intuitions of space and time are on the part of the subject to 
form the simple basal elements of our phenomenalistic 
knowledge. It is impossible moreover that they can them- 
selves become again appearances. Knowledge of appear- 
ances, as product, has for factors, on one side, the sense im- 
pressions of the object, on the other, the knowledge forms of 
our soul ; and just as the objective cause, or that through 
which feeling is effected, is a thing-in-itself, so beyond 



48 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE Vh^A 

doubt must also the pure forms of intuition and the pure 
concepts of the understanding which form the subjective 
cause, be things-in-themselves. How too, would it be pos- 
sible to acquire a knowledge of these subjective causes 
through experience, since experience in truth, according to 
the Kantian system, permits nothing to be known but ap- 
pearances, and so is as little able to bring at all within its 
reach things-in-themselves, not merely in respect of our 
own soul's existence but in respect of the outer world as 
well?" 15 

Beneke rejects a suggestion, which he himself makes, that 
the basal forms of human knowlehge might have been intro- 
duced by Kant as hypotheses, for the acceptance of which we 
must make further comparison with experience, " just as in 
the natural sciences we introduce the force of gravitation, the 
force of electricity, and in general all forces, which indeed no 
one has power to see or otherwise experience as forces, but 
which we, in order to gain some coherency among our expe- 
riences, first hypothetically assume, and then corroborate 
through comparison of consequences deduced from them 
with genuinely given experiences." 16 But Beneke's reason 
for not accepting this suggestion, not to mention Kant's ex- 
press rejection of hypothesis in critical philosophy, is that 
inasmuch as experience, according to Kant's own principles, 
could never at all attain to the in-itselfness of the thing {An- 
sich der Dinge), it never could reach it even intermediately, 
and so could not corroborate it at all. 

The fundamental error then of the Kantian system, to 
Beneke's mind, lay in regarding, on the one side, the objective 
in-itselfness, the x of the thing, on the other, the subjective 
forms, which also are things in themselves, as working 
together for the production of knowledge. In so doing 
Kant was already surreptitiously applying the causal relation 

15 Kant und die philosophische Atifgabe, pp. 28-29. 16 Ibid., p. 31. 



315] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 49 

to things-in-themselves, " which Kant in the most exact lan- 
guage," says Beneke, " shows as utterly inadmissible." 
Thus then the Kantian theory contained within itself an irre- 
solvable contradiction. While pretending to know those 
powers and forms of the mind which constituted the very 
conditions of experience, according to its own fundamental 
view, these powers and forms were in no manner knowable ; 
neither immediately through experience, since this is limited 
to product or appearance, and so cannot reach either unity 
or in-itselfness ; nor independent of experience (i. e. through 
the conceptive consciousness), for of the existence of what is 
constructed in this way out of mere concepts we have no as- 
surance. 

§ 8. Beneke 's Resolution of the Inherent Contradiction of the 
Kantian Theory — Beneke attempts to resolve the funda- 
mental contradiction inherent in the system of Kant first by 
the restoration of " inner experience" to at least a parity 
with " outer experience." The word experience he insists 
must be made to include inner as well as outer experience. 
The facts of inner experience, memories, imaginations, con- 
cepts, etc., are as truly realities for any given individual as 
the sense perceptions of his outer experience. The object of 
any given idea, the content of some particular concept, may 
indeed be, in one case, e. g., the analytic unity which the 
understanding gives to concepts, or in another, the synthetic 
unity which it gives to percepts. This unity, this " form of 
the understanding," may be indeed in /^//"unknown; so far 
as it is what is meant, or what is known by the particular 
concept, it only appears. But the given concept, apart from 
its content, is still to be recognized as a psychical existence; 
it is still, in the passing, as much a reality in the conscious 
experience of an individual as any given perception. And, 
moreover, it is in virtue of the nature of its content that we 
classify it as a fact of inner experience rather than of outer. 



5 o FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [ 3 j 5 

Therefore, even though we regard for the moment the facts 
of inner experience also as mere appearances, it is a great 
gain if we clearly recognize that both aspects of experience, 
inner and outer, are forms of consciousness, or knowledge, 
and in this respect at least are on an equal plane. 

§ 9. Internal Sense Yields Knowledge of a Thing in it- 
self 11 — But while both forms of conscious experience, outer 
and inner, as existences, or as having being, are to be re- 
garded on an equal plane, — in their phenomenal aspect, that 
is, in respect to the knowledge which they yield, these two 
forms, Beneke claims, are essentially different. In inner 
experience, in " inner sense," we have no mere knowledge of 
phenomena, but of a thing as it is in and for itself. The 
claim of the new idealism, he says, 18 " that our perceptions 
of our own psychical existence have not the least superiority 
over our perceptions of the outer world, since, in the former 
case as well as the latter, it is impossible to compare the 
perceived being with our perception of it, has on closer ob- 
servation no other ground than a false parallel between the 
outer sense and the so-called inner sense : which now, be- 
cause it too is called "sense," must, it is supposed, stand in 
like relations to the perceived thing as the former. The 
thing perceived through outer sense we cannot of course 
(in accordance with our previously gained conviction) ap- 
prehend in its complete truth, because we are not able 
to go out of ourselves to the thing. But this reason in- 
deed falls to the ground in respect to the perception of our 
own selves : we have the presented psychical existe7ice imme- 
diately in our power, inasmuch as we, the perceiving exist- 
ence, are at the same time also that which is perceived ; and 
consequently, since that which is perceived is just as near 
and as inner as that which does the perceiving, there is no 

17 Compare further § § 97 and 98. 

18 Das Verhnltniss von Seek und leib, (Gottingen, 1826), p. 43. 



3 i j ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE 5 r 

need of demanding of us the impossible feat of going out of 
ourselves to become another." 

§ 10. Permanent Value of the Kantian Analysis — The 
permanent gain resulting from the Kantian analysis, thought 
Beneke, is the clear recognition of knowledge, perceptive 
and conceptive, as a process as well as product, and the irre- 
sistible emphasis which in spite of itself it lays upon inner 
experience. The first wide opposition between the Kant- 
ian and other theories of knowledge was that the former re- 
garded empirical psychology as entirely useless for furnish- 
ing it with a foundation, Empirical psychology, according 
to it, had value only as applied philosophy, to which pure 
philosophy handed over its principles a priori. In spite of 
his fundamental contention that conception can yield no 
knowledge of existence, and that the existence of the object 
is given only in the perceptive consciousness, philosophic 
knowledge for Kant " was altogether the Knowledge of 
Reason through concepts, a knowledge a priori of all experi- 
ence, without any empirical source, inner as well as outer." 
And yet, whatever we may say as to the objective existence 
of the forms of intuition and the categories, this is only to 
emphasize the existence of concepts, of which they are the 
meaning or contents. And these concepts, as such, are facts 
of inner experience. As Beneke says : " How now did Kant 
attain to these universal rules which he sets up for our knowl- 
edge? Since he represents these as having objective valid- 
ity, as truly grounded in the nature of the human spirit, 
incontestably he got them only through inner experience." 
Again, " only through inner self-consciousness also could 
Kant become certain of the power which brings the human 
mind to the forms of its knowledge ; only through the inner 
self-consciousness could he become certain of the process 
through which knowledge is builded by these powers." And 
again, " only on the basis of inner experience can philoso- 



5 2 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [ 3 j 8 

phy, and in particular scientific knowledge of the human 
soul, be established with certainty and steadfastness." All 
this is only to give special prominence to inner conscious- 
ness as a fundamental datum of individual experience. And 
with the recognition of this fact we reach the fundamental 
starting point of Beneke's psychology and philosophy. 



CHAPTER II 
Beneke' s System in General Outline 

I THE SCOPE AND METHOD OF PSYCHOLOGY 

§11. Starting Point of Empirical Psychology — We are 
now in a position to see what Beneke regarded as the start- 
ing point of Empirical Psychology. That starting point is 
individual experience, and the insight that individual expe- 
rience is a perceptive and a conceptive consciousness exist- 
ing combined in an organic unit. Accepting the English 
interpretation of experience as phenomenalistic, and agree- 
ing with Kant that only through the unity of the soul is any 
experience at all possible, Beneke still finds himself at vari- 
ance with both his English and his German predecessors. 
With the English, as to their exclusively introspective or 
descriptive method, resulting in the conception of the soul 
as a hierarchy of faculties; with Kant and his successors, as 
to their purely a, priori method, resulting in the conception of 
the soul as a purely formal or abstract unity. His own 
method entirely precludes the criticism to which both the 
above are open, and particularly the criticism of Mr. Spen- 
cer on Kant, that the latter treats only of the adult con- 
sciousness. Beneke insists on the distinction between the 
developed and the undeveloped soul. It is the developed 
soul that distinguishes its experiences into the twofold aspect 
of perceptive and conceptive consciousness, or outer and 
inner experience. It is the developed soul alone that can 
be for us the source of our knowledge of the undeveloped 
soul. Beneke again and again insists on this. " Experi- 
3i9] 53 



54 FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [320 

ence," he says, " gives us at first only what happens." 
Therefore " we are able to acquire a knowledge of the pro- 
cesses of the soul not yet attained to consciousness only 
through our knowledge of the developed soul! '* Of our own 
earliest development self-consciousness tells us nothing ; and 
whatever we know of others (children) is very obscure. 

§ 12. Subject Matter of Empirical Psychology — The im- 
mediate subject matter, therefore, of empirical psychology 
is to be found in the facts of inner experience. This of 
course is not to exclude the investigation of the facts of outer 
experience, so far as these are phenomena in consciousness. 
But the reason for beginning with the facts of inner experi- 
ence is that if we are to know anything, we must be able to 
know the nature of knowledge itself. True knowledge, 
Beneke concedes, can be grounded only on perceptions. 
But this means that such knowledge is the experience gained 
from perceptions by comparison, and the interpretation of 
one in terms of another. And this knowledge falls entirely 
within the realm of ideas, or what has been called inner ex- 
perience or self-consciousness. And it has become possible 
only in so far as the soul has taken up and held fast the 
elements supplied by perception. Hence, urges Beneke, 
" knowledge must bear on it indelibly the stamp of the soul, 
and the highest basis for knowledge of the soul, will be the 
highest basis for all knowledge." 2 The immediate object, 
therefore, of psychology is what one finds in his self-conscious 
experience. And " however difficult may be the real limi- 
tation of the soul in comparison with what is corporeal, for 
the grounding of our knowledge, we have a thoroughly clear 
and sharply defined boundary line. The object of psychology 
is all that we apprehend through inner perception and sense. 

1 Lehrbuch der Psychologie ah Naturtvissenschaft (2d ed., Berlin, 1845), § 2I * 
This edition is the basis of all the following references to the lehrbuch. 

2 Erfahrungsseelenlehre ah Grundlage alles Wissens (Berlin, 1820) pp. 7-8. 



3 2 1 ] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE 5 5 

What we apprehend through outer sense is at least not at 
once and immediately suitable to be consumed by it, but if 
it is to become useful for it, must be explained upon the 
apprehension of the first species." 3 

§ 13. Psychology as Distinguished from Other Sciences — 
If now, in accordance with the previous analysis, we regard 
all that we perceive through outer sense as pertaining to 
body, and all that we perceive through inner sense as per- 
taining to soul, psychology distinguishes itself from the outer 
sciences, not as to its immediate object, for in each case is 
the immediate object a form of conscious experience, but as 
to its indirect object, or that to which conscious phenomena 
are referred. But while the observation of outer sense expe- 
rience is thus given over by psychology to the outer natural 
sciences, the knowledge resulting from such observation, 
since this, as an existence, is found in inner experience, is still 
regarded by it as falling entirely within its province, and so 
open to its criticisms and explanations. 

§ 14. The Method of Psychology — Beneke's conception of 
empirical psychology as a natural science will be considered 
at length when we come to the detailed statement of his psy- 
chological system. Here it will suffice to note his conten- 
tion that, while psychology is to be distinguished from the 
external sciences by its indirect object, in . method it is one 
with the natural sciences. That is to say, the methods of 
induction, hypothesis, and experimentation, which have 
proved so valuable in the external sciences, are equally ap- 
plicable to the facts of inner consciousness. 

II THE RELATION OF SOUL AND BODY 
§ 15. To Adopt the Method of Natural Science is not Ma- 

3 Lehrbuch der Psychologie ah A T aturwissenschaft (Berlin, 1845); Einleitung, 
§1. 



5 6 FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [322 

terialism — Beneke is careful to insist 4 that the adoption of 
the method of Natural Science is a very different thing from 
-Materialism. Indeed the analysis of experience just com- 
pleted, resulting in the conception of it, in any given case, as 
an individual consciousness which discriminates itself into a 
twofold aspect, inner and outer experience, brings forward 
in an entirely new light the long vexed question of the rela- 
tion of body and soul. Beneke has discussed this question 
in an elaborate work of some three hundred pages, "Das 
Verhaltniss von Seele und Leib," and has also set forth 
clearly his main conclusions on this point in the Lehrbuch? 
His great merit in this respect is the thoroughgoing fashion 
in which, on the basis of the critical philosophy, he disposes 
of the opposition as conceived by the old metaphysics, and 
the new light in which, in disposing of the older materialistic 
parallelism, he places our conception of the relation between 
corporeal and physical processes. 

§ 16. Opposition of Soul and Body one in and for Con- 
sciousness — The first point upon which Beneke insists is the 
fact that the opposition of soul and body, matter and mind, is 
one which exists alone in and for consciousness. Theory of 
knowledge, at its phenomenalistic stage, has analyzed ex- 
perience into a perceptive and a conceptive consciousness, 
into an outer experience and an inner experience. But this, 
it is to observed, is a classification as to contents. The con- 
tent of the perceptive consciousness is things; the content of 
the conceptive consciousness is thoughts? Outer experience 
is knowledge of material objects in space. Inner experience 
is knowledge of immaterial thoughts in time. Now a given 

4 Cf. Die neue Psychologies p. 6. 5 lehrbuch, Ch. I, part III. 

6 1 have occasionally used the terms "perceptive (or objective) consciousness," 
and " conceptive (or subjective) consciousness," to cover the distinctions of " ex- 
ternal sense," and " internal sense," or what Beneke denominates simply as 
" outer experience," and " inner experience." 



323] FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE 57 

"thing" of the perceptive consciousness, and a given 
" thought " of the conceptive consciousness, may each be- 
come the object of other conscious states or ideas. In other 
words, we may have knowledge about a thing, which origi- 
nally formed part of the perceptive consciousness, and 
knowledge about a thought, which originally formed a link in 
the conceptive consciousness ; and both kinds of knowledge, 
as being ideas in the restricted sense of the term, it is to be 
observed, fall entirely within the conceptive consciousness. 7 
And so, not only so far as these two original forms of con- 
sciousness, but also so far as these tw r o forms of conceptive 
consciousness, are clearly opposed, they are opposed, as 
Beneke says, in the one case, " for our apprehension," in the 
other for our "knowledge grounded thereon." 8 Since outer 
experience, as to content, yields knowledge of objective ma- 
terial things, and inner experience, as to content, yields 
knowledge of subjective immaterial things, even if provision- 
ally, on the basis of the Kantian theory, we regard both 
forms of knowledge as phenomenalistic, we may define both 
body and soul, matter and mind, in the manner already fore- 
shadowed : "All that we perceive through self -consciousness 
pertains to the knowledge of the soul, and all that we per- 
ceive through outer sense pertains to the knowledge of 
body." 9 

§ 17. Psychical and Corporeal Processes, Likewise Opposi- 
tions in and for Consciousness — But now the perceptive con- 
sciousness reveals more than things — it discloses among the 
coexisting material phenomena movements, events. The 
conceptive consciousness reveals more than thoughts — it 
discloses among its successive ideas relations. By observa- 
tion of the changes among material phenomena, we arrive 

7 That is, strictly speaking, " knowledge about things," forms the " ideas of sen- 
sation " of Locke, and " knowledge about ideas," his " ideas of reflection." 

8 Lehrbuch, § 43. 9 Lehrbuch, § 43. 



5 8 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [324 

at knowledge of the laws of Matter (Body) ; by observation 
of the order of succession and coexistence among our 
thoughts, we arrive at knowledge of the laws of Mind (Soul). 
Both kinds of knowledge tell us of processes ; on the one 
hand of the process of corporeal evolution, on the other of the 
process of psychical development; and just as we so sharply 
distinguish the perceptive from the conceptive consciousness, 
likewise we regard the utmost opposition as existing between 
these two processes. Thus again, for our apprehension, 
Motion, the form of activity of Matter, becomes so utterly 
opposed to Thinking, the form of activity of Spirit, that 
philosophy has even gone to the length of regarding these 
two forms of activity so independent and diverse as to be 
conceivable per se. 

§ 18. Real Relation between Soul and Body — It is not the 
intention at this point to attempt a complete answer to 
the question of the real relation between body and soul, or 
more strictly of the real real relation of consciousness to an 
external world. That is the problem for metaphysics, and 
a problem which, as Beneke conceived it, can be solved only 
after the preliminary work of empirical psychology is com- 
pleted. But we may now at least clear the way in part for 
the metaphysical solution by a juster appreciation of the op- 
positions just set forth. Philosophers, says Beneke, in criti- 
cism of the attempt of the earlier Metaphysics, in their zeal 
for a deep philosophical knowledge, have carried over what 
is merely " an opposition in knowledge" to the Real, with 
the result that they have represented the Soul and Body in 
opposition to each other "in their inmost bei7ig."™ The con- 
sequence of this has been that since the experience of every 
moment reveals body and soul in immediate coherence in 
one and the same being, and their immediate interaction one 
upon the other, there have arisen most wonderful hypothe- 

10 Cf. Lekrbuch, §44. 



•325] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 5 g 

ses, such as the " Conscious Automatism" of Descartes, the 
'"Occasionalism" of Geulinx, and the " Preestablished Har- 
mony" of Leibnitz. But the attempts of Cartesianism (or 
of modern Physiological Psychology 11 ), to set up the bodily 
organism as a mechanical automaton, with its fleeting 
accompaniment of psychical phenomena in mysterious 
parallelism, or the attempt of Materialism to reduce mental 
phenomena to vibrations of molecules of the brain, Beneke 
contends, must remain for ever impossible, just because not 
only the bodily organisms of other men exist for us merely 
as phenomena in our perceptive consciousness, but " even 
our own body, as every other corporeal thing, we apprehend 
only through the impress on our senses, and consequently 
* * * not immediately as it is in itself." " 

This argument holds good, also, when we apply it to the 
opposition between corporeal and psychical processes. Not 
only is this opposition, as was pointed out, one which exists 
for our apprehension, but it is also to be observed that 
" there is no kind of corporeal process which cannot under cer- 
tain circumstances become conscious, and, as a thing in con- 
sciousness (als Bewustes) be directly perceived by us." ld But 
in doing this it becomes something psychical. " Such a rev- 
olutionary change of a thing usually not a psychical apprehen- 
sion to a psychical apprehension, should be unthinkable in 
case of a fundamental opposition in their being ; only the 
more by this are we brought to the conclusion that both 
kinds of powers in their imiermost nature must stand very 
close to each other, and that for the explanation of their inner 
coherence and interaction no artificial hypotheses are neces- 
sary. What we apprehend of the human body through the 

11 Beneke in the Lehrbuch, § 47, note 3, expressly raises the question whether 
Anatomy or Physiology will ever succeed in demonstrating the parallelism of a 
thought, or a thought process, with certain molecular conditions of the brain. 

^Lehrbuch, § 48. 13 Ibid., § 48. 



6o FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [326 

senses, or what we usually call " the body," we have to look 
on only as the outward signs or representations of the inner 
(in itself ) being of the body, which just as in the case of the 
soul, consists of certain powers and their processes ■, which, 
while they are different from those of the soul, still in reality 
are like unto them." 14 

Ill THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS 
§ 19. Meaning of "the Origin" of Consciousness — The 
analysis just completed gives a new turn to the question of 
the origin of consciousness. What now, we may ask, is the 
real meaning of this question? The history of philosophy, if 
it has shown anything, has shown all experience to be a 
form of consciousness, that is, both outer and inner experi- 
ence have as their necessary and essential characteristics the 
grasping of multiplicity as unity. The manifold of sense, the 
successive series of seemingly discrete elements of the stream 
of thought, if really manifold, if really discrete, could never 
constitute experience, as we know it, much less yield con- 
sciousness of themselves as manifold or successive. If then 
we inquire as to the origin of consciousness, this must mean 
either of two things. First, the question must be as to the 
conditions and possibility of any experience whatsoever, i. e^ 
it must touch the grounds and possibility of both the per- 
ceptive and the conceptive consciousness as a whole ; or sec- 
ond, it must refer to the conditions and possibility of certain 
particular facts within either the perceptive or the conceptive 
consciousness. The former is the truly philosophical, or 
metaphysical question ; the latter may be regarded as a 
purely scientific one. 

§ 20. Metaphysical Method of Solution — In attempting to 
account for experience as a whole, Beneke shows himself in 
the widest opposition not only to the method of Materialism, 

14 Ibid., § 48. 



327] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE fa 

but also to the a priori method of procedure as employed in 
the metaphysics of Kant. 

His opposition to the materialistic method has already 
"been shown in his criticism y of the automaton theory. In 
spite of the great achievements of modern science, and of 
the value of the atomic theory as a working hypothesis, in 
spite of the valuable results achieved by physiological 
psychology, — the criticism of Berkeleian idealism, and the de- 
monstration by Theory of Knowledge of the conscious char- 
acter of all experience, must ever prove valid against crude 
Materialism. To begin with a universe of Matter existing in 
a real Space and thus attempt to account for all experience, 
is not only to fail on such a basis to render an intelligible 
account, but is also to ignore the very data of experience. 
That which is fundamentally given in experience is not a 
material universe in itself, existing in space, but the two 
forms of consciousness so often alluded to. This is why 
Beneke urges that, if we attempt to ask concerning the Real, 
" we must recognize that there can be no doubt that beyond 
all comparison we know better what a Soul than what a Body 
is." 15 Simply because body, so far as it is known, or enters 
into our experience, is already in the realm of the Soul, as 
forming part of our conscious experience. This too is why 
he points out that, as against Materialism, "the history of 
psychology shows one is not in a position ever to explain or 
to construct even the slightest thing in the development of 
the soul out of that which is material. And not only this, 
but there can also be no doubt that this will be just as little 
possible for all future time." 16 

Beneke's opposition to the a priori method of Kant touches 
the very heart of his conception of psychology as a natural 
science. According to Kant, empirical psychology was to 
have its principles predetermined and handed over to it by 

^Lekrbuch, § 47, note 1. 16 Lehrbuch, § 45. 



62 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [ 3 2 & 

metaphysics. The new philosophy, on the other hand, con- 
tends for the reverse process. The starting point for all 
scientific investigation is experience, and experience in the 
sense of the immediate consciousness of the individual. The 
a priori forms of Kant, the intuitions of space and time, and 
the categories of the understanding, are philosophical con- 
cepts which, as concepts, may or may not at a given time be 
present in the immediate inner conscious experience of an 
individual. But " all philosophical concepts are truly pro- 
ducts of the human soul; and only by a knowledge of the 
manner and way they originate in it can they gain their 
greatest clearness." 17 Only when we first on the basis of 
scientific observation and experiment have examined into 
the nature of the origin of our ideas, shall we be able to pass 
on their validity or ascertain clearly their presuppositions. 
And if this be so, not only is psychology the science of inner 
experience, but " the rest of the philosophical sciences con- 
sequently are all nothing more than an applied psychology." 1 * 
§ 21. Psychological Method of Solittion — Turning now to 
the second sense in which the question of the origin of con- 
sciousness may be understood, we find Beneke proposing 
this problem with an insight which, if it had been open to 
English thinkers, would, we must believe, have given an 
entirely different character to British traditional philosophy. 
The attempt to explain any given idea or consciousness as a 
whole as the mere product of the material, or, as Beneke 
puts it, the attempt " to carry the psychical development 
back to the corporeal," has already been shown to be in- 
valid, so far as we mean by the material or the corporeal, 
the " extra-mentem" or that which lies beyond all conscious 
experience, the so-called " real." But now there is an en- 
tirely new sense in which we may regard the psychical as a 
product of the corporeal. Any particular fact of the con- 

17 Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe, pp. 89-90. 18 Ibid., p. 91. 



329] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE $ 3 

ceptive consciousness, i. e., any given memory, concept, etc., 
may depend for its existence on certain material conditions. 
In other words, the condition of the existence of a given 
subjective fact may be some given material thing. For ex- 
ample, I should never gain the concept book, nor the memory 
of any particular book, unless certain objects had once pre- 
figured in my individual experience as a distinct part of my 
perceptive consciousness. But then a material thing, in this 
sense, is already a part of my conscious experience, and as 
existing within the conscious realm, already exists in the 
realm of the soul. The origin of ideas, then, in the sense of 
the material conditions of their existence, is to be under- 
stood, not as a question as to the direct dependence on, or a 
certain correspondence to molecular brain structure, of which 
we know absolutely nothing, but as a question concerning 
the dependence of one form of consciousness on another, both 
of which being directly present to clear conscious experience, 
and both of which, leaving their distinct traces in memory, 
lay themselves open to subsequent analysis, by virtue of 
which the whole psychical process of development or evolu- 
tion of the soul may be traced. It is at this point that 
Beneke's thought shows itself in most striking contrast with 
the philosophy of Mr. Herbert Spencer, to which his philoso- 
phy offers surprising points of agreement. His grasp of the 
conception of consciousness as an evolutionary development 
is most complete, but his great difference from Spencer is 
that the evolutionary process is regarded not as one of a 
mysterious unknowable, nor as one of a real physical process 
in a real physical universe, 19 but as a soul process, taking 

19 Mr. Spencer's well-known contention that his philosophy justifies neither 
idealism nor materialism falls to the ground in a remarkable admission made by 
Mr. Spencer himself in a reply to certain criticisms of Prof. Watson; " Our Space 
Consciousness: A Reply" {Mind, July, 1890). After arguing at considerable 
length that the great body of our space knowledge lies latent in our inherited ner- 
vous structures, Mr. Spencer says (p. 323) : *' Of course the interpretation takes 



64 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [330 

place entirely within the perfectly knowable realm of the 
soul. 

§ 22. Source of the Notion that Self -Consciousness is Mate- 
rially Conditioned — The origin of the notion that ideas are 
materially conditioned is not far to seek. The history of 
philosophy has shown how the French sensationalists in fol- 
lowing Locke carried back all ideas to sensations ; how Con- 
dillac expressly says: 20 "Our ideas are nothing more than 
transformed sensations;" how Diderot implied the same in 
his dictum 20 that " every impression which cannot find an ex- 
ternal and sensible object to which it can establish its affinity 
is destitute of signification." We have seen how for Hume, 
too, ideas were but faint copies of original impressions. 
What now is the ground of this procedure? What has given 
occasion to this view, Beneke declares, is " only the greater 
Clearness and Definite7iess which the presentations of the 
physical have, for a person unused to self-apprehension, over 
the presentations of the psychical." 21 But this superior clear- 
ness and definiteness of sense-perception, as we shall later 
find Beneke demonstrating, and as modern psychology has 
clearly made out, is not explicable as the unaided result of 
the exciting stimulus. The content of our perceptive con- 
sciousness owes its distinct, definite character in no small 
degree to the representative element present in it, that is, to 
the reinforcing effect of sub-conscious elements excited from 

for granted the existence of objective space, or rather of some matrix of phenomena 
to which our consciousness of space corresponds. Manifestly the hypothesis that a 
form of intuition is generated by converse with a form of things, necessarily pos- 
tulates the existence of a form of things." And Mr. Spencer attempts to justify this 
wholesale admission by a mere tu quoque / For he adds : " With this admission, 
however, may be joined the assertion that the Kantian hypothesis tacitly, though 
unavowedly, inconsistently makes the same assumption." 

20 Quoted by Sir William Hamilton : Metaphysics (Bowen's Edition, Cambridge, 
1861), p. 402. 

n Lehrbuch, ^46. 



3 3 1 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE ft 5 

memory. Beneke consequently urges as to the vividness and 
clearness of the contents of the perceptive consciousness that 
" this superiority still is grounded pttrely subjectively (i.e., 
in the nature of our power of intuition), and its being turned 
over to the 'real' or objective, can be justified by nothing." 2- ' 
Beneke goes even further. He claims that the apparent 
superiority in vividness of the facts of the perceptive con- 
sciousness is only an accidental circumstance, and that " by 
long-continued and judiciously conducted practice in the 
apprehension of the psychical product and its effect, an equally 
great, yea, even a still greater clearness and definiteness can 
be obtained.""' 3 

IV THE UNITY OF MIND OR CONSCIOUSNESS 

§ 23. Beneke compared with English and with German 
Thinkers — In psychological method and in metaphysical 
conclusion Beneke occupies a position somewhat midway 
between the English psychologists and the abstract German 
thinkers typified by Fichte, Schelling and Herbart. With 
the English psychologists his point of contact is his thorough- 
going reliance on introspection, with the difference that he 
carries introspection farther, and supplements it by hypoth- 
esis and experimentation. From the Germans his point of 
departure is his thoroughgoing attempt to deny not the ab- 
» Ibid., §46. 

23 Not to mention the superiority acquired by mathematical concepts and judg- 
ments, compare for an interesting experimental confirmation of a like superiority 
in the case of mental images, Meyer's account of his visual imaginations (Quoted 
by James, Psychology, Vol. II, p. 66). Meyer says : " With much practice I have 
succeded in making it possible for me to call up subjective visual sensations at 
will. ... I can now call before my eyes almost any object which I please, as a 
subjective appearance, and this in its own natural color and illumination; I can 
see them almost always on a more or less light or dark, mostly dimly changeable 
ground. Even known faces I can see quite sharp, with the true color of hair and 
cheeks." Most of these subjective appearances even left after images. See the 
page mentioned for further valuable details. 



66 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [332 

solute necessity of unity to experience, for to this he agrees, 
but that this unity may be conceived otherwise than as a 
concrete organic unity, — a complete concrete psychical 
organism. In this connection it is to be remembered that, 
while there are certain points of substantial agreement be- 
tween Beneke and Herbart, and while the latter was not 
without influence in moulding some of Beneke's views, still 
only by the most utter disregard of his concept of the soul 
as a " Simple," as maintained in his Metaphysics, was Her- 
bart able to set it forth in his psychology, as he practically 
did, as a single concrete psychological mechanism. 

§ 24. The Soul as a Hierarchy of Faculties — Beneke's 
view is in striking contrast to the Lockian concept of mind, 
which had resulted among English thinkers in the extremest 
form of " faculty psychology," with its hierarchy of relatively 
independent agencies, through the activity of which all men- 
tal phenomena were to be explained. Beneke shares 24 with 
Herbart the merit of freeing psychology from the evil con- 
sequences of this misconception. He himself regarded this 
improvement as the first and chief point in the thoroughgoing 
reform in psychological method which largely through his 
own and Herbart's efforts was beginning to be instituted in 
his day. The basis for this improvement, Beneke recognized, 
was laid by Locke in dealing a death-blow to " innate ideas," 
and in showing that all concepts arise by abstraction, and in 
last analysis grow out of presentations which have reached 
the intuitive stage, whether these presentations be in either 
outer or inner experience. But the advantage so gained was 
nullified by the retention of innate " faculties." The pheno- 
mena of the developed soul, or adult consciousness, it is 
true, allow themselves to be discriminated into certain psy- 
chical forms, — presentations, memories, imaginations, con- 

24 In the lehrbuch, § 12, note, Beneke expressly gives Herbart credit for his 
part in the new reform. 



333] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE §>] 

cepts, judgments, reasonings, volitions, etc. But because 
these various forms of consciousness can be brought under 
a single class concept, is no justification for referring them to 
a single " faculty" or power of the soul. Such faculties are 
naught but hypostasized class concepts, important enough 
purely as descriptions, but valueless so far as pretending to 
be a profound account of the nature of the soul. The true 
method of procedure, insists Beneke, is first to ask how 
these psychical forms arose in experience. Though we find 
them in the fully developed soul, " it by no means follows 
that faculties, or powers, must belong to the as yet unde- 
veloped soul, and be contained preformed in these psychical 
forms." 25 Beneke thus is one of the very first to insist that 
psychology must take more account of the evolutionary pro- 
cess involved in the development of all psychical forms. 
For as he says, with the emphasis of italics, " Of all these 
forms which we perceive in the developed soul, it is admitted 
that they are produced through a very long series of interven- 
ing processes!' 1 * 

§ 25. The Soul as a Simple, or Abstract Unity — Beneke's 
view, again, is in striking contrast with that concept of the 
soul which reduces it to a mere undifferentiated abstract 
principle. We have seen how Kant analyzed all experience 
into a form of consciousness, and how Beneke attached the 
utmost importance to the distinctions of outer and inner con- 
scious experience. If now we inquire as to the justification 
for applying the term consciousness to the twofold forms of 
experience, we shall find the essence of consciousness in- 
dicated even in the etymology of the word which stands for 
it. It is knowing together. Only so far as the manifold 
of sense is apprehended as one, only so far as successive 
feelings are apprehended in a thought which grasps their re- 

^Lehrbuch, § 10. 26 Ibid., § 10. 



68 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [334 

lations, can experience, such as we know it, be possible. 2T 
Both in the perceptive and in the conceptive form of con- 
sciousness then are we able to analyze out a " something" 
over and above the diverse constituents of the given exper- 
ience ; a " transcendental unity," without which, as constitut- 
ing its absolutely necessary condition, experience of any 
kind is utterly inexplicable. But there is great danger of go- 
ing wrong in the way in which we may understand this 
" something." How unrelated sensations, discrete, isolated 
impressions, could ever constitute experience, it is true, is 
perfectly unintelligible, But, on the other hand, an " empty 
Unity," a common being into which single things disappear 

27 Compare an interesting foot-note by Professor James, Psychology, Vol. i. 
(New York, 1893), P- *62, recognizing this "essential character" of experience, 
and confirmatory of the unintelligibility of regarding experience, or knowledge, as 
a series of truly distinct and separate elements : " It may seem strange to sup- 
pose," the note concludes, " that any one should mistake criticism of a certain 
theory about a fact for doubt of that fact itself. And yet the confusion is made 
in high quarters enough to justify our remarks. Mr. J. Ward, in his article Psy- 
chology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, speaking of the hypothesis that ' a series 
of feelings can be aware of itself as a series,' says (p. 39) : ' Paradox is too mild 
a word for it, even contradiction will hardly suffice.' Whereupon, Professor Bain 
takes him thus to task : ' As to " a series of states being aware of itself," I confess 
I see no insurmountable difficulty. It may be a fact, or not a fact ; it may be a 
very clumsy expression for what it is applied to; but it is neither paradox nor 
contradiction. A series merely contradicts an individual, or it may be two or 
more individuals as coexisting; but that is too general to exclude the possibility 
of self-knowledge. It certainly does not bring the property of self-knowledge 
into the foreground, which, however, is not the same as denying it. An algebraic 
series might know itself, without any contradiction. The only thing against it is 
the want of evidence of the fact' (Mind,xi., 459). Prof. Bain thinks, then, that 
all the bother is about the difficulty of seeing how a series of feeling can have the 
knowledge of itself added to it ! ! ! As if anybody was ever troubled about that. 
That, notoriously enough, is a fact : our consciousness is a series of feelings to 
which every now and then is added a retrospective consicousness that they have 
come and gone. What Mr. Ward and I are troubled about is merely the silliness 
of the mind-stuffists and associationists continuing to say that the ' series of states' 
is the ' awareness of itself; ' that if the states be posited severally, their collective 
consciousness is eo ipso given; and that we need no further explanation, or ' evi- 
dence of the fact.' " 



335] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE fig 

by " fusing," can be, as a later writer has put it, " nothing 
but a blank featureless identity." 28 Such a featureless iden- 
tity, Schelling, on the basis of the Fichtean Ego, attempted 
to establish as the groundwork of all that is, — an absolute 
identity or indifference. Such a featureless identity Herbart, 
inconsistently with his psychology, makes the soul, when he 
says: "The soul is a simple essence (Wesen), not merely 
without parts, but also without any kind of diversity or mul- 
tiplicity in its quality." 29 But Beneke protests again and 
again against the attempt to regard " the whole rich mani- 
foldness given in consciousness and in nature" as having 
" their being and their truth only in and through this poor or 
perfectly empty Unity." 30 As against Fichte and Schelling 
he exclaims : " All deduction of plenum from a vactium, of 
the particular from an abstract that is indifferent to the par- 
ticular, is a work of the imagination, and a smuggling in by 
stealth of what has been reproduced from previous ex- 
perience. Human thinking, of any sort, can only clear up y 
can only make prominent for clearer apprehension, what is 
already in part included in the material given to it for its con- 
sumption from elsewhere. It cannot create out of itself the 
content of a presentation. Only within the manifold can unity 
be found. Not the manifold within unity." 31 Or, as Beneke 
sums it up in another place and connection, 32 philosophy 

M Green: Prolegomena to Ethics (Oxford, 1890), p. 31, §28: "It is true, as 
we have said, that the single things are nothing except as determined by relations 
which are the negation of their singleness, but they do not therefore cease to be 
single things. Their common being is not something into which their several 
existences disappear. On the contrary, if they did not survive in their singleness, 
there could be no relation between them — nothing but a blank, featureless ident- 
ity. There must, then, be something other than the manifold things themselves, 
which combines them without effacing their severalty. 

29 Text-book in Psychology (Jr. by M. K. Smith, International Education Series, 
New York, i89i),p. 119. 

30 Kant und die philosophische Aufgabe, p. 45. 

31 Ibid., p. 62. 32 Ibid., p. 85. 



JO FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [336 

" dares not wish to be more simple than nature and the 
human spirit are themselves." 

§ 26. The Soul as a Concrete Psychical Organism — Ben- 
eke's own view of the original nature and being of the soul 
will be better understood after the detailed statement of his 
psychology. Here, however, we may indicate the nature of 
the substitute which he proposes for this " abstract unity," 
for this " undifferentiated oneness," in which the manifold of 
experience, as manifold, becomes lost and fused — that indif- 
ferentism of Schelling which Hegel characterized as "the 
night in which all cows are black." 93 Beneke clearly recog- 
nizes that " unity," in the sense of the apprehension of the 
manifold as one, is the form of all conscious experience. 
But then such unity, so far as known, is an existence for 
consciousness. It is merely the logical form of the presented 
contents of experience, and it does not therefore follow that 
we must because of it accept a fundamental faculty which is 
individual or one, or a power which is at once all in one 
(Gesammt Kraft). "The mistake has been made," he says, 
" that for all soul processes which agree with one another in 
form (for all concepts, desires, volitions, reasoning, etc.), a 
single fundamental faculty or unifying activity has been sup- 
posed, through which they become produced. But because 
they are one logically, ox for our perceiving, it does not at all 
follow that they must also in reality, or in their psychical foun- 
dation, be one (an identical oneness)!'™ "The (developed) 
soul," he continues, 35 " has not one understanding, one power 
of judgment, one will, etc., but thousands of powers of under- 
standing, of powers of judgment, of powers of will." Thus 
every cognition, every judgment, every emotion, every voli- 
tion, is a distinct and separate process in itself. There is no 
one same ' faculty,' ' form,' or ' category,' which presides over 

33 Cf. Schwegler, History of Philosophy, p. 318. 

3 * Lehrbuch, §11. 35 Ibid., Note 2. 



337] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE j i 

each and every particular experience of the varied kinds 
named, and into which all such particular experiences coalesce 
or become submerged in an indifferent identity. Nor is to 
say this to take away unity from the soul, but only to under- 
stand that unity, not as an abstract logical form, but as a 
concrete interconnection of parts constituting a system. For 
" of course everything in the soul is intimately united in a 
single whole or one. But not of this universal oneness is it 
treated here, but of the immediate oneness of truly particular 
forms one with another." 36 

The unity of the soul, then, as conceived by Beneke, takes 
on a new form as compared with the prevailing way in which 
it tended to be regarded by the German successors of Kant. 
The soul for him is " a throughout immaterial being, consist- 
ing in certain fundamental systems, which not only in them- 
selves, but also with one another, are in their true inwardness 
one, or form just one being!™ Thus, for the " simple soul " 
of the Herbartian, for the " abstract unity" of the Fichtean 
or Schellingian, Beneke substitutes the conception of the 
mind or soul as a concrete psychological organism. And 
this organism, as being an interrelated system, is in the truest 
and most intelligible sense of the word one. 

36 Ibid., Note 3. ^Lehrbuch, § 38. 



CHAPTER III 
Beneke's Empirical Psychology — Introduction 

i psychology as a natural science 

§ 27. Introduction — The empirical psychology of Beneke, 
we have already seen, starts with a very advanced conception 
of the nature of man and of knowledge. It accepts the naive 
attitude of phenomenalism and looks upon the individual as 
distinguishing himself into a two-fold form of experience, and 
regards both these kinds of experience as consciousness. By 
outer experience it means that panoramic series of pictures 
which in the individual's waking moments is incessantly 
passing before him ; or, not to give undue prominence to 
visual phenomena, outer experience includes, as Hume would 
put it, also all lively and violent " sensations, passions and 
emotions, as they make their first appearance in the soul." 
Visual, tangible, and audible things, then, and in fact all sen- 
sations, as they make their first appearance in conscious ex- 
perience, are regarded as " outer experience." By inner 
experience, on the other hand, is meant that stream of sub- 
jective remembering, imagining, reasoning or thinking, 
which we are ever conscious of as going on simultaneously 
with the passing show of the panorama before us. 

§ 28. Inner Experience the Immediate Object of Psychology 
— With this insight clearly in mind, we are in a position to 
appreciate the significance of Beneke's efforts to establish 
psychology as a natural science. 1 If it was the merit of Kant 

1 For a full discussion of this point see Die nette Psychologies Erster Aufsatz : 
" Ueber die Behandlung der Psychologie ah Naturwissenschaft," pp. 1-50. 
72 [338 



339] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE 73 

that he brought philosophy back to outer experience, it is 
Beneke's great merit that he brought psychology back to 
inner experience. The great success of the method of ex- 
ternal sciences had already become demonstrated in Be- 
neke's day. All psychology needed, thought Beneke, for a 
like success, was, beside a clear concept of its field and scope, 
the scrupulous use of those very methods which had so 
greatly aided natural science. This field was inner experi- 
ence, self-consciousness ; but the method of investigation was 
to be, as against the old metaphysical attempt to construct 
knowledge " out of mere reason," " out of mere concepts," 
or through " pure speculation," thoroughly scientific, that is, 
empirical. Psychology, as well as the outer sciences, was to 
depend directly and entirely on experience, but the experi- 
ence which was to be the distinct subject matter of psychol- 
ogy was inner experience. 

§ 29. The Objective Method Dealing with the Inner Ex- 
perience of Others — In making inner experience the direct 
subject matter of psychology, Beneke clearly recognized the 
possibility of two distinct methods of study, due to the fact 
that the experience with which psychology has to deal may 
be either the inner experience of ourselves or that of other 
men. Against the objective or comparative method, which 
deals with the experience of other men, certain obvious dis- 
advantages, it is true, may be urged. We as individuals are 
not in a position to perceive immediately and inwardly that 
which passes before the minds of others. We are limited to 
the outward signs of their inner thoughts, so that psychol- 
ogical knowledge attained in this way must, it would seem, 
be and always remain in the highest degree incomplete. At 
any rate, the knowledge so gained must at the best be a 
knowledge grounded on the analogy of our own individual 
experience. And since, " in every other man, every man 
sees only himself," it is all the more important, to avoid the 



74 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [340 

misinterpretation due to the limitation of our own individual- 
ity, that our own individual experience should be properly 
and fully interpreted by us. While therefore the psychologi- 
cal knowledge gained through others must always be more 
or less uncertain because of its indirectness, nevertheless 
this knowledge, urges Beneke, is not so uncertain as at first 
appears. The intense interest which mankind have shown in 
one another, coupled with the desire to learn with exactness 
what another thinks, feels and wills, has resulted in the for- 
mation of a language of signs, which through the cooperation 
of millions has gained an extraordinary richness. This lan- 
guage, too, through scientific labor, is capable of immeasur- 
able perfection, and indeed, says Beneke, the perfecting of it 
has already been undertaken with such success and zeal that 
on the whole, so far as the expression of human language is 
concerned, very little has been left to be desired. 

§ 30. The Subjective Method Dealing with the Inner Ex- 
perience of One's Own Self- — While fully appreciating the 
necessity of putting our purely subjective interpretations to 
the test of " general assent," Beneke nevertheless believed 
in the essential superiority of the subjective or introspective 
method. This superiority lies in the fact that what passes 
before us in our own experience is not only capable of more 
exact examination, but indeed is open to direct inspection or 
observation. For this reason, particularly in self-appre- 
hension, or inner experience, we have the chief source of 
psychological knowledge {die Hauptquelle der psychologischen 
Erkenntniss) . 2 

§31. Possibility of Applying the Method of the External 
Sciences to Inner Experience — I shall not attempt here to 
follow Beneke through his whole able discussion of psychol- 
ogy as a natural science, mainly because most of his con- 
clusions and arguments have become scientific common- 

2 Cf., Die neue Psychologie, p. 14. 



341 ] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE j^ 

places at the present day. It is not too much to say, how- 
ever, that he is the father of modern experimental psychology, 
although in the development of this method, his original 
standpoint and insight, as to the real starting-point of 
empirical psychology, has unfortunately in too many in- 
stances been entirely lost sight of. This starting-point was 
the phenomenalistic view of individual experience, with the 
explanation of both the inner and outer forms of which 
psychology has to do. Against the objection that inner 
conscious experience is not open to observation and experi- 
mentation in the same manner as outer conscious experience, 
Beneke argued with profound insight. We are apt to over- 
look the fact that a scientific observer is a trained observer. 
Mere observation of things will not yield full knowledge of 
them, but only acquired perceptive powers. The botanist in 
looking at the flower receives perhaps no more stimulation 
from it than the uneducated man. But how much more in a 
glance he sees ! This is only to show that in outer percep- 
tion there are varying grades of clearness, definiteness and 
exactness. But this, too, is true in the case of internal per- 
ception. By unnumbered repetition, not only the vaguest, 
faintest sensation, but all the facts of inner sense can be 
brought to like grades of clearness, deflniteness and exact- 
ness. And this is true even of the most fleeting ideas. 

The experimental method has become so firmly intrenched 
in psychology in these days that there is no need to repeat 
the arguments by which it was first established. It is ex- 
ceedingly interesting, however, to note some of the various 
ways in which Beneke, as one of the earliest advocates of the 
method, thought it could be employed. " We are able, for 
example," he says, "to think upon a circumstance after pre- 
viously we have thought upon a like one, or of something 
differing from it in this or that degree, and with this or that 
degree of attention, during this or that length of time." 3 

3 Die neue Psychologie, p. 20. 



ye FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [342 

Continuing in this strain, he suggests other varied experi- 
ments with memories, percepts and feelings, so common- 
place at the present day as to need no further mention. 

II GENERAL NATURE OF THE PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEM 

§ 32. The Problem Stated — The first point in attempting to 
solve the fundamental psychological problem, the alterations 
in consciousnoss, is clearly to conceive the nature of the 
problem and the data with which we may begin. Beneke, 
familiar as we have seen with the results of Locke, Berkeley,, 
and Hume, accepted as data that description of individual 
experience which regarded it as distinguished into two great 
orders or series of phenomena, the so-called lively or vivid 
impressions of Hume — outer experience, and the so-called 
fainter internal ideas — inner experience. Impressions distin- 
guish themselves into a multiplicity of objects or things, the 
investigation of the coherency and relations of which consti- 
tutes the natural sciences ; while ideas distinguish themselves 
into memories, imaginations and cogitations (meaning by this 
latter, concepts, judgments and reasonings), the discrimina- 
tion and description of which constitutes the work of descrip- 
tive psychology, and the origination of which in any given 
individual constitutes the work of education in the broadest 
sense of that term. On this basis, then, of a clear circle of 
changing impressions and a concomitant stream of fleeting 
ideas, theory of knowledge continues its work. Its task is not 
to describe the contents and coherences either of the circle 
of impressions or the stream of ideas, but taking in hand some 
individual experience, to interpret the exact manner in which 
the alterations in that conscious experience take place, and 
just how a given individual experience grows to be what it is. 

§ 33. Previous Attempts at Solution of the Problem — The 
failure of previous philosophers either to conceive clearly the 
nature of the psychological problem as involved in the phil- 



343] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE jj 

osophical interpretation of experience in its twofold aspect, 
or to furnish an adequate solution of it, was fully appreciated 
by Beneke. If the individual experience is to be distin- 
guished into two forms or aspects, a perceptive conscious- 
ness and a conceptive consciousness, — a realm of things, 
and a realm of thought, — then an adequate psychology will 
account for the nature growth, and implications of both 
these forms of experience. 

But, as to a psychology of the perceptive consciousness, 
the shortcomings of the earlier English philosophers have 
already been pointed out. Locke never got beyond a purely 
descriptive faculty psychology of the most pronounced type, 
and, as a matter of fact, never seemed to grasp vividly 
enough the distinction of inner and outer experience so 
often contended for in these pages. For the " Ideas of Sen- 
sation " and " Ideas of Reflection " of Locke, while ap- 
parently distinguishing experience into external and internal 
perception, seem only too frequently in his pages to be ideas 
in Hume's restricted sense of the term, and so fall entirely 
within the conceptive consciousness or inner experience ; 
while the differentiated picture or aggregate of things which 
at any moment constitutes a given individual's percept of the 
outer world, seems again and again to be entirely passed 
over or lost sight of by him. Berkeley, again, while showing 
a distinct recognition of the perceptive consciousness, and 
referring to it as consisting of " real things" in spite of his 
recognition that in all developed visual perception we go be- 
yond present sense, not only fails to show how the alleged 
" aggregations " of sensations could ever constitute " things," 
but avoids the necessity by supposing them to be directly 
" imprinted on the senses by the Author of Nature." 
Finally Hume, in his account of the nature and origin of im- 
pressions, also fails to render a satisfactory account of the 
perceptive consciousness. Instead of starting with the com- 



yS FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [344 

plex consciousness given in immediate experience, Hume 
almost at the outset assumes that it is made up of certain 
" simple perceptions or impressions " such as admit of no 
distinction or separation. These simple impressions, it is 
true, are regarded as somehow combined into " complex im- 
pressions," which may be distinguished into parts. But why 
a given individual's perceptive consciousness at a given 
moment is such a complex as it is, why it is made up of lesser 
groups or complexes of simple impressions, are questions 
which Hume, in respect to the perceptive consciousness, 
does not pretend to answer. As to the origin, too, of im- 
pressions, Hume is equally silent. " As to those impressions, 
which are from the senses," he says, 4 " their ultimate cause 
is in my opinion perfectly inexplicable by human reason, 
and 'twill always be impossible to decide with certainty, 
whether they arise immediately from the object, or are pro- 
duced by the creative power of the mind, or are derived from 
the Author of our being." 

It was the defects of these English doctrines of impressions 
as a theory of perception, or as even a description of the 
perceptive consciousness, that awoke Kant from his dog- 
matic slumber. The attempt of Hume to describe the per- 
ceptive consciousness as a mosaic of disconnected sense 
impressions continuously undergoing lightning-like kaleido- 
scopic changes, only served to force into clearer relief as the 
essential nature of such consciousness its characteristic of mul- 
tiplicity in unity. A psychological atomism of the Humean 
type not only fails as a true description, but could never 
serve as an intelligible fundamental foundation for experience 
in the form which the perceptive consciousness reveals it to 
be. Momentary experience, as we know it, is manifestly 
and obviously the apprehension of the manifold as one. 

4 Hume, Treatise of Human A T ature, p. 84. 



345] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE yg 

The absolute condition of the very existence of the percep- 
tive consciousness, Kant therefore urged, is the " trans- 
scendental unity," or synthetic activity, which stands over 
and above the multiplicity given in sense perception and 
gives unity to it. 

Further, as to a psychology of the conceptive conscious- 
ness, the shortcomings of the earlier English psychologists 
are likewise manifest. We need not review here the views of 
Locke and Berkeley, but may proceed at once to their out- 
come in the psychology of Hume. However willing Hume 
was to regard the coexistences and successions of simple im- 
pressions as entirely fortuitous, he readily allowed that, in 
inner experience, simple ideas (supposed to be fainter copies 
of original simple impressions) are not entirely loose and 
disconnected subjective facts which somehow fall into groups 
by chance. The imagination in its workings seems, he says, 
to be " guided by some universal principles, which render it 
in some measure uniform with itself in all times and 
places." 5 The same simple ideas, experience frequently 
shows, fall regularly into complex ones. How could they 
do this unless there were some kind of union among them, 
some associating quality, by which one idea naturally intro- 
duces another? But this "uniting principle among ideas," 
in Hume's hands, finally resolves itself into a mere tendency 
of the imagination to feign, becomes a " fiction of the mind," 
and as the mind or soul itself is ultimately explained away 
by Hume, the relations among ideas are ultimately made to 
depend on those relations of contiguity and succession in 
the perceptive consciousness, which were left over by Hume 
unaccounted for, and as "perfectly inexplicable." 

It was likewise the defects of this earlier English doctrine 
of the interconnections of ideas which Kant attempted to 

5 Treatise of Human Nature, p. 10. 



3o FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [346 

remedy. "Whatever may be the origin of our ideas, 
* * *," he urges, "they must all belong to inner sense. 
All knowledge is, therefore, at bottom subject to time as the 
formal condition of inner sense, and in time every part of it 
without exception must be ordered, connected and brought 
into relation with every other part." * * * " Now if I 
draw a line in thought, or think of the time from one day to 
another, or even think of a certain number, it is plain I must 
be conscious of the various determinations, one after the 
other. But if the earlier determinations — the prior parts of 
the line, the antecedent moments of time, the units as they 
arise one after the other — were to drop out of my conscious- 
ness, and could not be reproduced when I passed on to later 
determinations, I should never be conscious of a whole ; 
and hence not even the simplest and most elementary idea 
of Space and Time could arise in my consciousness." 6 That 
is to say, Kant here again would emphasize the unifying ac- 
tivity as the peculiar function of mind, and this unified char- 
acter — multiplicity in unity — as the peculiar characteristic of 
all experience, outer or inner. 

The whole point of the criticism, so far advanced as to 
previous theories regarding both perceptive and conceptive 
consciousness, and the point which marks in particular the 
advance on Hume, centres about the synthetic activity which 
reveals itself as the dominating characteristic of experience. 
This much, at least, is clear gain from Kant, that the ele- 
ments of experience are more than absolutely independent, 
disconnected psychological atoms or sense impressions. So 
far as a manifold of sense has conscious existence at all, it 
appears to a percipient Ego or Self, the essential character- 
istics of which are, on the one hand, the ability to synthe- 
size the manifold given it in experience, and so apprehend it 

6 Critique of Pure Reason (Watson's Selections), p. 57. 



347] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE 8 1 

as one, on the other hand, the ability to preserve and repro- 
duce its separate experiences in time. And only on the 
basis of such a hypothesis is explicable the simultaneous 
presentation of the multiplicity of coexistence and the multi- 
plicity of succession as wholes. 

§ 34. The Problem as Conceived by Beneke — Beneke's con- 
ception of the true nature of the fundamental psychological 
problem takes him back to this point in the Kantian criti- 
cism. The whole effort of German philosophy subsequent 
to Kant had turned upon the definition or understanding of 
the transcendental unity or Ego, which Kant had implied as 
the fundamental condition of any experience whatever. 
And in the hands of Fichte, Schelling, and, as Beneke 
thought, Hegel, this Ego had been made out to be little 
better than a " a poor, empty unity," a logical abstraction 
spun out by the old reprehensible metaphysical method of 
explicating concepts. But the starting point of psychologi- 
cal investigation is not the preconception handed over to it 
by metaphysics of the Soul, either as a " Simple," or as a 
"Transcendental Ego," innately furnished with forms of in- 
tuition and with categories. The real starting point is Ex- 
perience, inner and outer, and ultimately the immediate 
object of psychological inquiry must always be the investi- 
gator's own conscious experience in its twofold aspect. 
Experience, so conceived, reveals itself as a series of kalei- 
doscopic changes ; and only when we have first investigated 
how the alterations in the consciousness constituting an in- 
dividual experience are to be conceived, shall we be able to 
reach any conclusions regarding the original nature and 
being of the Soul. 

There are two points, therefore, in the investigation of the 
psychological problem, upon which Beneke, in his criticism 
of previous theories, strenuously insists ; first, the individual 
character of the problem, and second, the necessity of an 



82 FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [348 

exacter insight into the meaning of changes in conscious- 
ness. As to the first point, Beneke insists that preceding 
theories have been " entirely too general" in character, " and 
therefore incapable of being applied to the explanation of 
individual experiences." 7 As to the second point, the pre- 
ceding prevailing doctrine, in its explanation of changes in 
consciousness, had never gotten beyond "what was figura- 
tive." "It has spoken," he says, 8 "of a 'slumbering,' of an 
'awakening,' of a 'being awakened,' of ideas, of an 'associa- 
tion ' among them, etc. But it tells us nothing of the precise 
thing which happens in these processes." 

What now is "the precise thing which happens" when 
changes in the content of immediate conscious experience 
take place? There are three things, says Beneke, which 
psychology wants to know about the alterations of con- 
sciousness : ( I ) Exactly what is changed in a presentation 
when from being a conscious state it becomes an uncon- 
scious trace, or that which is capable of later re-entering 
consciousness as a memory; (2) Exactly what change takes 
place in this trace or tendency, when it is restored to con- 
sciousness ; (3) Exactly what is imparted to it on its being 
combined with others. 9 

Ill BENEKE' S DOCTRINE OF TRACES 
§ 35. Transition — Before entering directly upon discussion 
of the fundamental psychological problem as outlined by 
Beneke, it is first necessary to explain what is perhaps the 
most important part of his whole psychology, his general 
doctrine of the persistence of psychical forms. 

§ 36. The Fact of Persistence and How Known — No facts 
of consciousness, it is generally conceded, are more in evi- 
dence or are more obvious than the constant reproductions 
of original experiences which, in their phenomenal aspect at 

7 Lehrbuch, § 86. 8 Ibid., Note. 9 Cf. Lehrbuch, § 86, note. 



3 49 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE % 3 

least, have gone by forever. No facts of consciousness, 
nevertheless, have more failed of proper interpretation than 
these. It is the custom of modern psychologists of a cer- 
tain type, in their almost ludicrous efforts to conform to a 
so-called rigorous " scientific method," to begin their work 
with elaborate descriptions of the human nervous organism. 
Then, on the basis of this preliminary preconception, they 
endeavor to interpret not only the facts of memory, but those 
of all conscious life. Not so with Beneke. He as a psycho- 
logist who has risen to the conception of experience as a 
form of consciousness, and who, having completed his de- 
scription of the facts, is ready to interpret them, founds his data 
on the twofold form of conscious experience so frequently 
insisted on. Beginning with this as a basis, so obvious when 
attention is properly called to it, as to become a postulate, 
the true psychologist next looks whether there are any other 
facts which come home to consciousness with like coercive 
or axiomatic force. Such a fact is the unconscious persist- 
ence of psychical forms. All memories, considered as psy- 
chical existences, and at the moment of their forming part 
of an individual experience, are facts of inner experience. 
Any memory, considered as to content, reproduces either an 
original fact of outer experience, or an original fact of inner 
experience. The reproduction of previous experiences, in- 
ner or outer, as memories, is so obvious and constant a fact 
of every day life that, as Beneke says, it is only too surpris- 
ing that preceding speculation had never supplied an ade- 
quate theory of its nature and significance. " Reproduc- 
tions of presentations, and other psychical forms repeat 
themselves in every moment of our waking lives, so that in 
consequence, there lies before every man immeasurable riches 
of facts of this sort ; and one therefore would think that the 
theory on this point must long ago have raised itself to the 
highest clearness and exactness." 10 

10 Lehrbuch, § 86. 



34 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [350 

How now do we know of the unconscious persistence of 
psychical forms ? Simply through the fact of reproduction. 
Conscious experience shows itself to us as an almost con- 
tinuous process of change. But we soon find that this 
change is not so far-reaching a matter as at first appears. 
It is not so much a change in things or being ; it is only 
change in conscious activity. And we soon find that "every- 
thing which has once been formed in the human soul with 
any completeness, preserves itself, even after it has vanished 
from consciousness y or from an active psychical form into un- 
consciousness or the inner being of the soul y from which it 
thereupon can later emerge into a conscious psychical form or 
be reproduced."™ Thus then in view of these most obvious 
and universal facts of experience, we are led to believe in 
the unconscious persistence of psychical forms, and the basis 
of our knowledge of such persistence is the obvious fact of 
reproduction. 

§ 37. Nature of Unconscious Persistence — Beneke, how- 
ever, thinks that we may do more than merely affirm that 
persistence of. some sort is a fact of conscious experience ; 
we may say something as to the nature of this persistence. 
A psychical form, or conscious phenomenon, which is not 
now present to consciousness, which in other words has sunk 
into a subconscious or latent state, may be regarded from 
two points of view — in reference to the original conscious 
experience, inner or outer, of which it is the vestige, and in 
reference to the reproduced conscious experience, of which 
it is the foundation. This " unconscious persistent," in rela- 
tion to the psychical product which continues in this manner 
to exist inwardly, Beneke calls " a trace " (eine Spur) ; and 
in relation to the psychical product which is formed upon it 
as a foundation, or which can proceed from it, a " rudiment,'' 
or " tendency " (eine Angelegtheii) . Vl 

1 * Lehrbuch, § 27. 12 Cf . Ibid., § 27. 



3 5 I ] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE 8 5 

As to the nature of " traces," so far as they are uncon- 
sciously persisting things, Beneke boldly asserts that they 
are psychical existences. Traces, of course, in that they are 
unconscious, cannot, he grants, be represented or known 
immediately as they are in themselves. But " the trace is 
what lies between the product of a soul activity (e. g. a sense- 
perception) and its reproduction (e. g. as a memory) ; and 
since both these acts are psychical acts, we have a right to 
represent also the trace only in psychical™ form. 14 

§38. The Philosophical Significance of Memory — Beneke' s 
doctrine of the persistence of psychical forms becomes of the 
greatest importance because of the profound psychological 
significance which it assigns to the facts of memory. Facts 
of the individual's outer experience (Things), and facts of 
the individual's inner experience (Ideas), are apprehended 
in consciousness not only as single objects, but possess 
varying grades of vivacity, clearness, intensity, activity and 
rapidity of development. Undoubtedly a scientific man 
when he perceives a given flower actually sees more at 
a glance than would an uneducated individual looking at the 
same object. Undoubtedly, too, the idea, which the scien- 
tific man has of this flower, is livelier, clearer, more active 
(when actually present) in determining the complexion of 
the succeeding states of inner thought, and characterized by 
more ramifications or interconnections, than that of the un- 
educated man. How, then, a given perception, or a given 

13 To the contention that retention is a purely physiological fact, Beneke would 
reply as follows : If we ask concerning the " where " of a given trace the answer 
is that it is " nowhere." For as with the soul in general, so with all its parts, 
they are " nowhere." If again we ask whether " traces " are not somehow at- 
tached to the bodily organs, the answer is plain. Bodily organs exist too as facts 
for the perceiving consciousness, as part of the content of outer experience, and 
at most can only be said to be parallel to subjective facts. In no intelligible sense 
of the word can traces be said to be " attached " to bodily organs. 

14 Lekrbuch, § 29. 



86 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [352 

idea, or even the perceptive consciousness of the individual 
as a whole, has attained to its present vivacity, clearness, in- 
tensity, etc., are questions towards the solution of which, in- 
sight into the nature and significance of memory affords inval- 
uable aid. Beneke therefore maintained that his theory was 
important for two reasons. In the first place, a direct con- 
sequence of the doctrine that " traces are not cast out of the 
soul by their becoming unconscious" is to emphasize that 
any given fact, either of outer or of inner conscious exper- 
ience, is not to be explained as a ready-made product 
stamped clearly and immediately in all its completeness on 
the blank passivity of the soul ; but rather that such in- 
dividual facts, as well as the momentary perceptive con- 
sciousness as a whole, has its origin and its definite character 
determined in no small measure by the mass of memories 
which form the subjective possession of the soul. In the 
second place, the doctrine is important in forcing to a clear 
issue the real problem which presses psychology for solution. 
It is not the persistence of psychical forms that needs ex- 
planation, since we may explain this on the ground that 
" What has once happened continues to exist until it is de- 
stroyed again in consequence of some special cause!' 15 What 
then must yield to explanation, urges Beneke, " is not the 
retention but the becoming unconscious of what previously was 
conscious!' 15 

Beneke's doctrine of traces thus brings us back to that 
conception of the fundamental psychological problem with 
which we started, and especially to the discussion of those 
specific questions which must be answered if the alterations 
of consciousness are to be. explained in any profound sense 
of the term. 

15 Lehrbuch, § 28. 



CHAPTER IV 
The Psychology of Inner Experience 

i general introduction 

§ 39. Transition — We are now ready for the scientific in- 
vestigation of experience — inner and outer. These two 
forms of experience, we have seen, are the real data for 
scientific inquiry ; both are to be regarded as forms of con- 
sciousness ; and for the understanding of both the doctrine 
of the persistence of psychical forms is of vast significance. 

§ 40. Knowledge both a Product and a Process — We must 
notice, however, at the outset, a distinction which has proved 
revolutionary in modern psychology — that between knowl- 
edge as a product, and knowledge as a process. Beneke, it 
would seem, was one of the first psychologists to appreciate 
the full significance of this distinction. " All psychological 
observation," he says, "is confined to consciousness, and the 
process of awakening to consciousness, consequently, as that 
in which consciousness first takes place (which therefore pre- 
cedes in ^/^-consciousness), is necessarily withdrawn from 
our observation." 1 Thus, so far as we treat a "thing" of 
the perceptive consciousness, or a "thought" of the concep- 
tive consciousness, merely as a product, that is in respect 
to its presented content, we never get beyond the realm of a 
purely descriptive psychology. Only when we attempt to 
get at the presentative activity back of the given thing or 
thought — at the process back of the product, do we get on 

v Lehrbuch, § 87. 
353] 87 



8 8 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [354 

the track of what really will throw light on our fundamental 
problem — the changes and alterations of consciousness. 
But inasmuch as the process of knowledge is apparently 
shut off entirely from direct observation, it would seem as 
though psychology had here struck a chasm which it could 
never bridge. 

§ 41. Changes TO Consciousness ', and Changes IN Conscious- 
ness — While it is true that if the psychologist can never get 
beyond immediate consciousness, the task of psychology 
must prove hopeless, it is also true that there is a real way 
out of this difficulty. At no point in his whole philosophy 
does Beneke show himself profounder than in this distinc- 
tion : If the process of awaking to consciousness is not open 
to direct observation, the process of arising in consciousness 
is. And, since every conscious change, once clearly ex- 
perienced, remains as a trace in the inner being of the soul, 
we may by recollective reflection on previous experience see 
exactly how changes in consciousness have taken place, and 
thus, if there be any, discover the laws which govern these 
changes. Consequently, may we not further, on the basis 
of the facts so ascertained, argues Beneke, " make the in- 
quiry whether we are not in a position to explain also the 
mounting from an unconscious to a conscious state in accord- 
ance with like laws?" 2 In consequence of this distinction, 
the investigation of inner experience naturally comes first. 
For the facts of outer experience, as Beneke alleges, are in 
part the product of stimulants taken up from the outer 
world, but the facts of inner experience are forms of con- 
sciousness directly depending on other immediate forms of 
consciousness (those of immediate outer experience). 

*Lehrbuch, § 87. 



355] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE 89- 

II INNER EXPERIENCE : ORIGIN OF INDIVIDUAL FACTS 

§ 42. The Facts of Inner Experience — Inner experience 
reveals itself as a series of ever-shifting states or pulses, each 
of which has a definite individual character. To these indi- 
vidual states or pulses, in order to distinguish them from 
things or external impressions, we may apply the generic 
term thoughts, or ideas. Ideas then, further, differentiate 
themselves into certain specific kinds : imaginations — repro- 
ductive (i. e. memories proper) and productive, concepts,, 
judgments, and reasonings. Beneke distinctly recognizes 
each of these kinds. Memory'in general, as we have already 
seen, is merely the persistence in the inner being of the soul 
of what has once formed part of the clear conscious experi- 
ence of the individual. Properly speaking, however, Beneke 
contends, there is no such thing as memory in general. 
There are only specific memories, for " every individual 
presentation has its own particular memory."* Memories 
proper then are imaginations of the individual reproductive 
type. But so-called productive imaginations, Beneke holds, 
are also reproductive. That is, " in respect to content (the 
material) of their representation, they are merely reproduct- 
ive; productive, entirely in respect of their form."* 1 These 
two types are, in the wide sense of the term, reproductive 
imaginations (Einbildungsvorstellungen). The existence, 
moreover, of concepts (Begriffe) judgments (Urtheilen) > 
and inferences (Schlilsse), are all fully and specifically re- 
cognized by Beneke as facts of inner conscious experience. 

§ 43. The Origin and Growth of Ideas — Whatever we may 
say ultimately and finally as to the nature and meaning of 
conscious experience as a whole, the scope of the method of 
investigating the origin and growth of the facts of inner ex- 
perience, as was shown in the discussion upon the origin of 

3 Lehrbuch, § 103. 4 Ibid., § 109, note 2. 



90 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [356 

consciousness, 5 has for psychology been clearly made out. 
We saw then that the question of the origin of ideas is one 
"concerning the dependence of one form of consciousness upon 
another, both of which being directly present to clear con- 
scious experience, and both of which leaving their distinct 
traces in memory, lay themselves open to subsequent analy- 
sis, by virtue of which the whole psychical process of develop- 
ment or evolution of the soul may be traced." It is just in 
virtue of this fundamental fact, — viz., that everything that 
has once taken place in experience with any measure of 
clearness persists in the soul as a memory, that we are able 
to trace out the exact process by which the given occurrence 
has come to pass. With this method in mind, we proceed, 
therefore, to the examination of those changes which take 
place entirely within the conscious realm. 

(1) Memories — If we inquire first as to the origin of the 
simplest facts of inner experience — -memories of particular 
objects — we must note first what, in Beneke's psychology, 
becomes demonstrated of all the facts of inner experience, 
that they all depend on certain original experiences in the 
perceptive consciousness. The person who has never seen 
an alligator can have no memory of an alligator. The per- 
son who has never heard the music of the hautboy can have 
no memory of those particular sounds. Beneke thus agrees 
with Hume " that any impression either of the mind or body 
is constantly followed by an idea, which resembles it, and is 
only different in the degrees of force and liveliness." But 
while with Hume, " the chief exercise of the memory is not 
to preserve the simple ideas, but their order or position," 6 
with Beneke memory, in the sense of persistence, assumes a 
clearer function, and is indicative of an important psycho- 
logical process. My memory of the face of my intimate 

5 Chap. II, § 21. 6 Treatise of Human Nature, p. 9. 



3 5 7 1 FRIED RICH ED UA RD BEN EKE g r 

friend, whose photograph I see every day, is a more vivid, 
clearer inner experience, than my memory of the face of 
some casual accuaintance, whom I have beheld but once or 
twice. Why ? Because I have seen my friend's face as 
pictured in the photograph a thousand times, my acquaint- 
ance's once. Each time I have seen the former, that con- 
scious experience in becoming unconscious has become a 
trace. These unconscious traces in my soul, being precisely 
similar, or almost so, all tend to fuse, and represent them- 
selves in consciousness as a single distinct act. If then 
memories gain in clearness and definiteness through unnum- 
bered repetitions of the original experience which they repre- 
sent, it is only because of the fusion which has taken place 
among these separate traces in consequence of the mutual 
attraction due to their similarity. 

(2) Concepts — We may inquire now as to the manner in 
which and the materials out of which concepts arise. Sup- 
pose there were presented to my visual consciousness either 
simultaneously or in immediate succession the following ob- 
jects : A piece of coal, a clump of soot, a lot of pitch, some 
ink, a raven, and mourning clothes 7 . There would irresistibly 
arise in inner consciousness the concept " blackness." Now 
in each of these things, so dissimilar as a whole, there were 
certain constituent parts common to all. As each of these 

7 In this whole section I have availed myself of illustrative material and pre- 
cisely formulated statements given in a most valuable little exposition of Beneke's 
system by Dr. G. Raue : Die neue Seelenlehre Dr. Beneke's nach methodischen 
Grundsdtzen in einfach entwickelnder Weise fur Lehrer bearbeitet. This book 
was afterwards enlarged and improved by J. G. Dressier, Director of the Normal 
School at Bautzen, Beneke's leading follower. It is the book that has done most 
to make Beneke known to German teachers. 

An English translation of this work was made by some unknown person in 
1 87 1. Morris in one of the supplementary notes to his translation of Ueber- 
weg's History, cites (Vol. II., p. 285) this work as a translation made by Raue of 
Beneke's Lehrbuch der Psychologie. Raue's work was really written in German, 
and is an original exposition of Beneke's system.' 



g 2 FRIED RICH ED HARD BENEKE [ 3 5 g 

things was passed before me, the dissimilar elements occurred 
but once, whereas that which was similar was repeated six 
times. As the coal passed before me it left its trace in the 
soul; then the soot, the pitch, and the remaining things 
likewise. These traces, because of their similarity, instantly- 
attracted each other, or fused as one object. And in pro- 
portion to their greater frequency, the common elements 
were reproduced or represented more strongly and clearly 
than those peculiar to each of the stated objects. In this 
manner, then, experience shows concepts first arise. 8 

A like process is at work in the formation of higher con- 
cepts. Suppose by the method above explained, I had 
already acquired in separate ways the concepts, blackness,, 
redness, blueness, greenness. Let some one now, by means 
of symbols or otherwise, simultaneously or successively 
arouse in my consciousness these several concepts. In- 
stantly there arises a new concept, a higher one, which I 
learn afterwards to designate as " color." Hence we reach 
this general conclusion : " CONCEPTS arise in the human soul 
because the similarities in different notions of individual 
objects (Intuitions) mutually attract each other and fuse 
together into one whole ; and as concepts so formed have also 
points in common, they in turn coalesce, and hence arise NEW 
and continually HIGHER CONCEPTS." 9 

(3) Judgments — When once a concept has been produced, 
in consequence of the law of persistence of psychical forms,, 
it continues to exist in the inner being of the soul. Suppose 

8 "When, therefore, there are no intuitions, there can be no concepts answering 
to them. Hence a man born blind has no concept of ' Color,' although he knows 
the name; the man born deaf has no concept of ' Sound,' nor can such persons 
ever obtain these concepts. Similarly those who live in equatorial regions are 
destitute of the concept ' Ice,' nor had Luther any concepts of coffee, tobacco, 
steam-engine, etc." — G. Raue, in his " Elements of Psychology, on the Principles 
of Beneke^ (English translation, Oxford 1871), p. 35. 

9 Raue's Elements (op. cit.), p. 37. 



359] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE 93 

now, having acquired the concept " blackness," I am again 
shown the objects mentioned above. Instantly I say: 
" These things are black." It would be possible to show by 
thousands of instances that " when we perceive anything, as a 
rule a concept rises into consciousness in addition to that per- 
ception." Again, if the word red or black is mentioned, I 
instantly think, " This is a color." In other words, instances 
are equally numerous, in which a higher concept is summoned 
into the mind along with another. We mean by judgments, 
then, cases where either a like concept is called into con- 
sciousness along with a (simple) perception, or a higher con- 
cept of like kind along with another concept. And here 
again the essential thing to notice is the attraction of like 
for like and their fusion. 

(4) Inferences — The psychological process involved in 
u drawing a conclusion" is thus stated by Dr. Raue, one of 
Beneke's earliest and most enthusiastic followers : 

" In the human soul there are very often several judg- 
ments conscious at the same time. Take the judgments : 

All men are mortal 
A Moor is a man 

Here we have three concepts side by side, man, mortal, Moor. 
While the first judgment affirms ' mortality' of all men, i. e., 
of the whole compass of that concept, the second declares 
that the Moor is included in that compass. 

"What takes place? 'Man' and 'Moor' are similar con- 
cepts, for Moor is but another name for man — it only signi- 
fies a particular kind of human being. Hence these two 
concepts will coalesce, but in such a way that Moor will re- 
main present to consciousness. In fact this concept is forced 
with special strength upon the consciousness, the conse- 
quence of which is that not it, but ' all men' is obscured, and 
almost vanishes from consciousness. The movable elements 



94 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [360 

which kept it consciously present are withdrawn from the 
latter, and are attracted to the more strongly emphasized 
term ' Moor.' Hence the only thing the dissimilar concept 
'being mortal' can do, is to attach itself to the term Moor, 
now vividly conscious: and so the inference (the inferring 
judgment) is drawn — (Therefore) the Moor is mortal also. 

" If in two judgments there is a total want of similar con- 
cepts, though they may coexist in consciousness, yet they can 
give rise to no new judgment, no conclusion, no inference. 
Suppose for instance, 

The bird flies 
The fish is aquatic 

Here each is outside the other, and no inference is possible 
in such. As the concepts in the judgments, iron is hard, 
and honey is sweet, can never coalesce, so neither can the 
former. 

" When therefore two judgments are re7idered SIMULTAN- 
EOUSLY conscious, and in them are contained similar concepts 
together with one DISSIMILAR one, the similar concepts fuse 
together and a new judgment is produced ; because the DIS- 
SIMILAR concept must attach itself to that one of the similar 
concepts which in one of the judgments has been brought defi- 
nitely and prominently into consciousness."™ 

§ 44. First Fundamental Psychological Process 11 — The ex- 
amination of the facts of inner experience, as above set forth, 
therefore, seems to yield a fundamental law governing the 
formation of the psychical forms found in inner experience. 
This law, however, Beneke contends, is more than a mere 
descriptive " law." It is in fact a real fundamental psycho- 
logical process unceasingly at work in the life of the human 

10 Raue's Elements, pp. 43-44. 

11 For Beneke's statement of the four fundamental psychological processes, see 
the lehrbuch, Chap. I , I : Grundprocesse der psychischen Entwickelung. 



3 6 1 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE g 5 

soul. It is given by him as the fourth of his " fundamental 
processes," and is stated as follows : 

" Like products of the human sou/, or similar products, ac- 
cording to the measure of their similarity, attract each other or 
strive to enter into closer union with each other." 12 

Ill INNER EXPERIENCE: A CONTINUOUS PROCESS OF 
REDISTRIBUTION 

§ 45 . Introduction — Having completed now this review of 
the individual facts of inner experience, resulting in the dis- 
covery of a fundamental psychological process underlying 
their formation, we must turn attention next to two other 
important aspects of this form of consciousness. Inner ex- 
perience reveals itself at once as a continuous process of 
change, and also as a series or chain of associated ideas. 
Hence arise two fundamental psychological questions. The 
first is twofold : a) when once either a perception or an idea 
has sunk into an unconscious state and so become a trace, 
exactly what change takes place in it by virtue of which it is 
restored to consciousness?; b) why should an idea that is 
immediately present in conscious experience ever become 
unconscious at all? The second fundamental psychological 
question asks concerning the connection between ideas : 
since a given perception or idea shows itself in experience 
to be connected with a thousand different associates, why is 
it that in the succssion of ideas, a given psychical form at 
certain times summons in its wake one particular associate 
rather than another? 

§ 46. Alteration in Inner Experience a Change in Activity 
— Inner consciousness is never continuously one individual 

32 Lehrbuch, § 35. Raue called this formula the "Law of the Mutual Attrac- 
tion of Similars" Beneke regarded the process as requiring almost no elucida- 
tion, because there lie open to immediate observation such abundant instances of 
the process, not only in its result but also in its happening. 



96 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [362 

substantive state, whether memory, concept, judgment, etc., 
in the unchanging contemplation of which it has become 
utterly absorbed. Inner consciousness, to be sure, can be- 
come submerged, as it were, in a long train of thinking on 
one distinct topic ; but, generally speaking, it is always a 
fleeting series of subjective facts in which memories (proper), 
concepts, judgments, etc., each follow close upon the heels 
of the other with unceasing rapidity. If now we accept the 
contention so far made, that " in general what has once been 
formed in our soul with a certain degree of completeness can 
not become lost again," 13 and that u the source or origin of the 
powers and faculties of the developed soul is to be found in 
the traces of the earlier aroused psychical developments , ,,u this 
continuous alteration which our self consciousness shows, 
becomes understood in a new light. Since the soul is stored 
with the records or memories of its previous experiences, 
change in inner consciousness then is a change " only in ac- 
tivity" (nur die Erregtheii) . 15 The absolute condition of re- 
tention or unconscious persistence is certain original clearly 
conscious experiences, perceptive or conceptive. The con- 
dition of recall is that these unconscious forms be actively 
excited or aroused. 

§ 47. Beneke's Doctrine of " Movable Elements " — If now 
we inquire why any particular subjective fact occupies at 
the immediate moment the theatre of inner consciousness, 
the question is one as to how this given fact became actively 
aroused. When I look at the photograph of my friend 
there instantly flashes into my mind, i. e. } there engages my 
immediate inner consciousness, either a memory of my 
friend's face, or some fact or circumstances which in my past 
experience have been associated with him. When, as stated 
a moment ago, I looked at pitch, ink, soot, a raven, etc., in- 

13 Lehrbuch, § 28. " Ibid., § 31. 15 Ibid., § 27. 



363] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE g 7 

stantly there arose in my inner consciousness the concept 
" blackness ;" and this was followed by the judgment, " these 
things are black." When, too, my mind, i. e. y inner con- 
sciousness, momentarily becomes centered on the memory of 
my friend's face, instantly there is suggested or arises into 
active consciousness, a number of successive subjective 
facts, which may happen to come in the form of memories, 
judgments, or inferences, relating to my friend. These in- 
stances, which of course might be multipled indefinitely, all 
go to show that all conscious appearances forming part of 
the content of the total momentary percept called outer ex- 
perience, as well as all facts of immediate inner experience, 
have effective power to bring trailing into immediate clear 
conscious activity, certain psychical forms which, the instant 
before, were utterly outside clear conscious experience, or, 
in other words, were existing as unconscious or inactive 
traces. What then is the meaning of this power of conscious 
forms, already present in immediate experience, to call up 
and make active other forms? It can only mean, contends 
Beneke, that the stimulating forms actually yield up or trans- 
fer certain " movable elements," or stimulants, which prove 
effective in making consciously active those forms to which 
they become transferred. " Traces or unconscious psychical 
forms consequently," he says, " become conscious or active 
psychical forms, because there flow over to them from those 
forms already active, elements suitable to effect this mount- 
ing to active consciousness." 16 This is Beneke's doctrine of 
movable elements, which, as will be shown later, plays so im- 
portant a part in his system. These elements, besides 
" movable " or " balancing elements " (beweglicher oder aus- 
gleichungselemente) are also called by him, because of their 
function, " elements of consciousness " (Bew?isstseinele- 
mente). " 

16 lehrbuch, § 89. " lehrbuch, § 89, note 2. 



q8 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [364 

§ 48. Immediately active inner Consciousness the Resultant 
of a Dynamic Process — That limited span of ideas or 
thoughts which constitutes the immediate inner conscious- 
ness of the moment, Beneke therefore regards as a sort of 
momentary state of equilibrium brought about by the distri- 
bution or diffusion over a certain area of the soul, as it were, 
of certain movable or balancing elements, toward stimulation 
by which the unconscious, that is, inactive traces in the inner 
being of the soul are ever striving. Or to put it in his own 
words, "Traces or rudiments are not indeed cast out of the 
soul by their becoming unconscious, and must therefore also 
take part in the universal balancing of the movable elements 
for which all the psychical forms of our being are striving." 18 
We see then why certain memories, concepts, judgments, etc., 
are continually re-arising in consciousness. Immediately act- 
ive inner consciousness, as Beneke interprets the facts of the 
case, is a continuous readjustment or balancing process — a 
perpetual alternation of disturbances of equilibrium and com- 
pensating balancings or adjustments. Consciousness thus, in 
the sense of knowledge, is both product and process — static 
and dynamic. So far as we regard active consciousness as 
a substantive state, i. e., as unity embracing multiplicity, we 
are emphasizing its static condition or phenomenalistic as- 
pect, which is confined entirely to the side of presented con- 
tents. But the static condition, or knowledge as a product, 
is the resultant of two factors — on the one hand, the psychi- 
cal form, or trace, which is aroused from the inner being of 
the soul, on the other, the movable elements or stimulants 
which are transferred to it from some actively aroused form 
of consciousness. Thus so far as we regard active conscious 
forms as such resultants, we gain an insight into the dynamic 
aspect of consciousness, or knowledge as a process. When 

18 Lehrbuch, § 89. 



365] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE gg 

therefore we regard some conceptive form of consciousness 
as directly depending for its activity on some other form of 
consciousness, perceptive or conceptive, we must not fall 
into the error of supposing that Beneke in claiming that 
something real, from the percept or concept that sinks into 
obscurer consciousness, is actually transferred to the form of 
consciousness that gains in clearness, means to say that any 
part or portion of the presented contents of the form or 
presentation, becomes transferred in its qualitative aspect as 
presented contents to the latter. 19 Not only the forms of inner 

19 It is to be regretted that in the only serious critical, though brief, estimate we 
have in English of Beneke's psychological views (G. F. Stout : " Herbart com- 
pared with English psychologists and with Beneke," Mind, January 1889), mis- 
apprehension on this point should have led to severe criticism of Beneke. Mr. 
Stout says, (p. 23) : " Many of Beneke's hypotheses are no doubt wild and un- 
tenable. But the general conception of the working of the psychological me- 
chanism through which presentations disappear and reappear, or wane and wax 
in distinctness, seems to have a firm basis in fact. I do not mean that the theory 
of transferable elements can be in any way justified. What I refer to is the gen- 
eral principle that the rising of one presentation is so correlated with the sinking 
of others, and vice versa, that the whole process can best be formulated for 
psychological purposes as a transference of something from the presentation which 
wanes in distinctness to that which waxes in distinctness. This something we may 
regard either as a reality or as a fiction, and we may call it attention or psychi- 
cal energy, or by any other convenient name. But we must not, like Beneke, re- 
gard it as a constituent element of the presented content. Nothing is ever trans- 
ferred from one presented content to another. A presentation becomes more or 
less distinct as more or fewer qualitative details become distinguishable in it. 
Now it is obviously untrue that the qualitative details of one presentation ever be- 
come transferred to another when the latter become clearer in consequence of 
the former becoming obscured." Certainly it is a grievous mistake to regard Be- 
neke as contending for any such view as that just stated. Every conscious appear- 
ance or presentation, Beneke continually contends, is a product whose factors are 
always, on the one hand a primary power or group of primary powers (the essen- 
tially psychical elements),- on the other, certain stimulants, which so far as their 
being is concerned in respect to the soul, may be external or internal. It is either 
these primary powers themselves, or the stimulants which have been appropriated 
from without and made a permanent possession of the soul, that form the trans- 
ferable elements. This indeed is the basis for the profound distinction between 
Beneke and the English associationists. With the latter it is sensations that are 



100 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [366 

experience (ideas), but also those of outer experiance (per- 
cepts) are to be regarded in one aspect as phenomenalistic 
products ; and so what actually becomes transferred from the 
exciting form of consciousness is some part of its factors, 
which to be sure, on the representative side of conscious- 
ness, may qualitatively re-present precisely what it was on 
the representative side of the original stimulating percept ; 
but then this only becomes known to a third conscious ex- 
perience, which analyzes out the common elements of the 
two preceding experiences. 

§ 49. Why Forms Immediately Present in Inner Conscious- 
ness become Inactive — The second form of the main question 
so far discussed, touching the reason why an idea immedi- 
ately present to inner experience ever sinks out of active 
consciousness, is easily answered. If a given idea (whether 
image, concept, judgment or inference), has risen into active 
consciousness by virtue of a certain gain or stimulation of 
movable elements, it becomes inactive again, or a mere trace, 
by suffering a corresponding loss of those elements. If, in 
the case already cited, the judgment — " These things are 
black," is instantly followed by the judgment — " Black is a 

aggregated and segregated so as to give rise to all the higher and varied cemplex 
forms of experience. With Beneke it is what lie back of sensations, and make 
them possible, that become associated. Beneke recognized that even could we 
penetrate in consciousness to the most elementary ground of all things, the atom, 
we should only reach " elementary appearance" and we must still look back of 
this for its producing factors (compare Metaphysik, p. 122). With this conception 
of factors there is of course a way out out of the difficulty as to the doctrine of 
transferable elements. Mr. Stout fully recognizes this himself when he con- 
tinues : " Only when we disregard presented content, and merely formulate the 
mechanical connection of mental processes in its quantitative aspect, do we find 
a legitimate scope and meaning for the conception of a transferable somewhat 
continually redistributed within the mental system. From this point of view, 
however, the conception is certainly of value, and it is to be preferred to Her- 
bart's theory of conflict." Certainly this is the point of view which Beneke 
both in spirit and expressly held. Compare infra, § 66. 



367] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE j 1 

color," this is because the movable elements which had been 
at work rendering the concept " blackness " active, have 
again become transferred with the effect of arousing or excit- 
ing into active or immediate clear consciousness the concept 
" color." 

§ 50. Second Fundamental Psychological Process — The 
obvious conclusion from these facts of inner experience is 
that the alteration in activity revealed in inner experience, 
is best conceived to be in the nature of a balancing process 
— in one case, " a partial discontinuance of stimuli," 20 in con- 
sequence of which a psychical form becomes a memory or 
trace ; in the other case, a compensatory restoring of stimuli, 
in consequence of which it again enters active consciousness. 
The second fundamental process of conscious experience, 
then, may be stated as follows : 

"In all psychical combinations , at every moment in our 
lives, there is an active striving towards a balancing or equal- 
izing of the movable elements contained in these combina- 
tions.^ 

IV INNER EXERIENCE: AN ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS 

§51. Introduction — Having seen that in general an idea is 
roused into active consciousness because of the transference 
to its unconscious trace of certain movable elements, we 
must turn now to consider the specific question why in a 
given case a particular idea actually aroused in conscious- 
ness becomes supplanted by one particular idea rather than 
any other with which it has been frequently associated. As 
this question of the direction of changing consciousness in- 
volves the nature of the connections between ideas, the latter 
problem is considered first. 

20 lehrbuch, § 88: " A partial disappearance of this stimulant changes the con- 
scious sensations and perceptions again into unconscious traces or rudiments." 

21 Beneke's " third " fundamental process. Cf. Lehrbuch, § 26. 



102 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [368 

A — THE CONNECTIONS BETWEEN IDEAS 

§ 52. Nature of the Problem — The real problem involved 
in the " association of ideas" was very sharply distinguished 
by Beneke. The inability of the general laws of association 
as set forth in purely descriptive psychology, to explain the 
conscious experiences of an individual, has already been 
pointed out. "It is claimed," says Beneke, "that presenta- 
tions become associated and awaken one another after the 
relations of Similarity, Coexistence and Succession, Con- 
tiguity in Space, Causal Connexion, Contrast, etc. But 
almost every presentation has at some previous time arisen 
with numerous different presentations in all of these rela- 
tions. Why therefore does the awakening follow, at one 
time this, at another time that relation, and why does some 
special one of the many associated presentations become 
awakened ? " 22 To answer this question psychology must 
know precisely " what is imparted to an idea on its being 
combined with others." 

§ 53. Essential Nature of the Union between Like Psychical 
Forms — Since common experience shows us that the union 
between ideas is of two distinct kinds, that between psychical 
forms perfectly alike, and that between unlike forms, we 
must look first to discover the nature of the union between 
the former. It has been postulated, it will be remembered, 
that experience is a twofold form of consciousness, outer 
and inner, and that, as a matter of daily experience, original 
experiences, whether facts of outer or of inner experience, 
become reproduced as memories. These memories, so far 
as memories, are facts of inner experience. Assuming for 
the moment outer or perceptive consciousness, it is these 
facts of inner experience that we are trying to account for. 
Suppose now there is presented to my perceptive conscious- 

^Lehrbuch, § 86, Chapter III., on " The Reproduction of Traces," § 86, note 2. 



369] FRIEDR1 CH ED UARD BEN EKE j 03 

ness for the first time the photograph of a person ; or sup- 
pose that I hear for the first time some shrill note. The 
moment the photograph is withdrawn from my field of view, 
and the moment the note dies away — likeness and note, 
ceasing from active consciousness, become memories or 
traces in the inner being of the soul. If now, on a later 
occasion, I see again the identical photograph, or hear again 
the same shrill note, again there will be left in the soul traces 
of these experiences, and these traces will become more 
numerous in proportion to the number of times the original 
experience is repeated in exactly the same way. To each 
of the traces of the photograph above mentioned, no matter 
if seen a thousand times, Beneke would assign a distinct 
numerical existence in the inner being of the soul. Upon 
those numerous traces the psychological process of the 
mutual attraction of the similar of course tends to operate ; 
but unless this process was supplemented by that of the 
actual transference of balancing elements, there could arise 
no real bond or connection between these similar traces. 
They would remain but a " mere aggregation" of discrete 
individuals. But these similar traces, Beneke claims, do 
enter into an organic or vital relation, and this relation or 
connection is also something numerically real and distinct in 
the soul. We know this because " even of this transference 
of movable elements from one psychical form to another, 
traces remain in the inner being of the soul." 23 And it is 
this transference that becomes the ground of " all enduring 
relation." That a ''permanent linking or union" between 
these similar forms, then takes place, is due, Beneke con- 
cludes, to the "balancing process" by virtue of which the 
movable elements are transferred from one form to another. 
§ 54. Effect of Conscious Activity on the Inner Character 

™Lehrbuch, § 34. 



1 04 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [370 

of the Trace 1 * — A first characteristic, then, of the inner 
nature of a trace, is this strengthening ( Verstdrkung) or 
close bond of intimacy which has resulted in consequence 
of similar psychical forms being aroused to active conscious- 
ness. The second time my friend's photograph occupied a 
part of my perceptive consciousness, it, in consequence of 
the law of the mutual attraction of similars, was immediately 
attracted towards the trace of the original sense perception, 
the original perception having became a trace by losing part 
of its stimulation. But not only were the two conscious 
forms, percept and trace, attracted, but the actively conscious 
percept, in consequence of the universal balancing process, 
transferred some of its stimulants to the unaroused trace, and 
thus tended to make the latter consciously active. When 
now this virgin trace lapses again into an inactive state, it 
does not do so unchanged. It has entered into organic re- 
lation with the second trace. There has been formed 
between the two traces a connecting path, as it were, which 
Beneke regards not as " an ideal relation, but as something 
real continuously existing in the inner being of the soul." 25 
This path or connection, too, has resulted from the actual 
transference of movable elements. And every time a new 
similar memory has been formed, this process has repeated 
itself until the thousand traces of the given photograph form 
a complete organic tissue in the soul's inner being. 

Besides this organic union resulting from conscious 
activity, the trace in its inner nature possesses two other im- 
portant characteristics, dependent on the quantity or number 
of exactly similar traces. Sense perceptions, as well as 
other immediately active sense forms, become traces, we 
have seen, because of a partial disappearance of the balancing 

2 * Cf. lehrbuch, Chapter 3, IV : Wirkung der Erregung auf der inner e 
Beschaffenheit des Erregten. 
25 Lehrbuch, § 34. 



3 j i ] FRIED RICH ED HARD BENEKE 1 5 

elements, by the appropriation of which they have become 
active. This means then that every time an actively con- 
scious form lapses into unconsciousness, " a part of the bal- 
ancing elements remains behind with the inner trace, or 
united with it." 26 Thus the greater the number of separate 
traces forming the given organic aggregate, the greater will 
be the quantity of balancing elements remaining. The 
direct and important result of this then is that, since this 
organism of traces " will afterwards require fewer balancing" 
elements in order to become genuinely conscious," such an 
organism is brought nearer the threshold of consciousness. 
While a second important effect of the quantity of traces on 
the connection between conscious forms, is that the union 
will be most intimate where the greatest number of traces 
completely alike have fused, or better, become interconnected 
in one organic aggregate. 

§ 5 5. Effect of the Inner Character of the Trace on Active 
Consciousness * 27 — The inner being of the developed soul, thus, 
according to Beneke, is a mass of organized memories or 
traces. But, if now I have seen the same photograph a 
thousand different times in precisely the same way, when I 
recall this object, the separate traces left by the original per- 
ceptions do not come trooping into consciousness one after 
the other. " In consciousness this aggregate of similars 
presents itself as a single act (Bin Akt), which, according as 
the number of these elements is less or greater, gives itself, 
so far as known, a fainter or stronger character." 28 When 
therefore the final memory arises in consciousness, although 
really a manifold, it appears as a unity. But its manifold- 
ness, in which consists its quality ', is perceived not immedi- 

26 Lehrbuch, § 97. 

27 Cf . Lehrbuch, Chap. 3, III : Einfluss der inneren Beschaffenheit des Zuerre- 
genden. 

28 Lehrbuch, §95. 



1 06 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [372 

ately, or qualitatively, but only by means of its strength or 
vivacity, i. e., quantitatively . 

§ 56. Laws of Quantitative Differences of Presentations — 
Two very important laws are to be observed in respect to 
this quantitative difference of presentations, and to its bear- 
ing on the balancing process at work in effecting active con- 
sciousness. Although a part of the stimulation remains in 
connection with a conscious form even when it sinks to a 
trace, and in consequence, the quantity of traces in a given 
aggregate requires less stimulation to restore it to active 
consciousness, nevertheless it is not the total trace ( Gesammt- 
angelegtheiten) , as an aggregate, but the simple traces indi- 
vidually, that form the true basis for the balancing or equal- 
izing of the movable elements. Hence results the first law: 
that " every aggregate or psychical form co7ttains the more 
balancing elements,™ the more simple traces it arises from. 30 
But it also results that the greater the number of simple 
similar traces united in a given aggregate, the greater will be 
the capacity, so to speak, of this aggregate for the balancing 
elements, Such an aggregate then tends to draw from the 
immediately active and stimulating conscious form all its ac- 
tivity, without giving back any in return. Hence the second 
law : " The greater the number of simple traces from which 
a given presentation arises, the more fitted it is to appropriate 
and hold fast for itself those eleme7its tending to bring about 
active consciousness! ' ( Erregungselemente) 31 

§ 57. Nature of the Union Between Unlike Psychical Forms 
— So far the discussion has turned on forms supposed to be 
perfectly alike. But daily experience reveals cases of imme- 
diate connection of percept with percept, percept with idea, 
and idea with idea, where the connected elements, in pres- 

29 That is, plays a more effective part in determining the character of immediate 
active consciousness. 

30 Lehrbuch, § 95. 31 Ibid., § 96. 



373] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE I0 / 

ented contents, vary from the closest resemblance to almost 
total unlikeness. Taking for granted, for the time being, 
separate percepts or individual intuitions, as well as the in- 
terconnected group of things that constitutes the immediate 
momentary percept of the individual, we may note, as to 
inner experience, that not all ideas are reproductive imagina- 
tions, in the sense of exact " copies" or images of original 
sense-perceptions or impressions. Inner experience has 
been distinguished into other psychical forms also — fancies, 
concepts, judgments, inferences. The idea, therefore, which 
appears to be immediately associated with any given percept 
or other idea, may show itself to subsequent reflective 
thought to have been of any one of these psychical forms. 
A raven, forming part of the pictured content of my field of 
view, might instantly suggest to (i. e. y make active in) my 
conceptive consciousness, the memory of another resembling 
bird ; while the judgment, " This raven is black," might 
arouse the inference, " This raven has as one of its qualities 
color." Now the connection between all so-called unlike 
forms is to be explained on this basis of a partial similarity 
of the constituent elements of each. The memory of the 
piece of coal instantly "suggests" the memory of the raven, 
because, when these two percepts were originally immedi- 
ately present in consciousness, elements similar in each were 
immediately attracted to each other. A like process takes 
place when any two partially similar ideas of any kind are 
immediately present in active consciousness. But, in any 
case, this process of attraction is immediately followed by an 
actual transfer of " movable elements " between the two like 
portions. And it is this trace or track, left in the being of 
the soul by the actual transference of balancing elements 
from one similar form to another, that is the ground of con- 
nection between the forms, and this " connection," as we 
have seen, is to be regarded not as ideal, but as something 



1 08 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [ 3 74 

real. The connection between unlike forms thus has as its 
deepest ground the connection between like forms, the like 
forms being, in this case, like parts or portions of the con- 
nected unlike forms. 

§ 58. Relations Between Separate Percepts and Between 
Percepts and Ideas Strengthened by Repetition — Where the 
process of transference is not too rapid, not only traces of 
the original coexisting percepts or concepts remain, but 
there also continues to exist in the inner being of the soul, 
traces of that immediate flowing over of movable elements. 32 
Thus these connections or relations between individual per- 
cepts, between individual ideas, and between percepts and 
ideas, come also to be represented in inner conscious ex- 
perience. And just as memories of individual percepts are 
at first less lively than their correspondent percepts, so at 
first these relations, on the presented side of inner experi- 
ence, "are of course in and for themselves rather faint; but 
by virtue of frequent repetition they too are able to attain to 
every grade of strength or clearness ( Verst'drkung) , so that 
they are able to surpass even [the first] " (i. e.) those or- 
iginally given in outer conscious experience. 33 In conse- 
quence, then, of these connections formed between forms 
perfectly alike, and between heterogeneous individual forms 
of conscious experience, the inner being of the soul becomes 
one organic tissue of more or less intimately connected 
psychical forms, which on the presented side of active con- 
sciousness appear sometimes as groups of coexisting, and 
sometimes as trains of successive, elements. 

3 ' 2 "Auch das Zugleichfliessen der beweglichcn Elemente im inneren Seelensein 
fortexistirt" — lekrbuck, § 34. 
33 Lehrbuch, § 308. 



375] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE l0 g 

B DIRECTION FOLLOWED IN THE TRANSFERENCE OF CONSCIOUS ACTIVITY 34 

§ 59. Law of the Direction of Consciousness — Having 
clearly in mind the nature of the connection between various 
psychical forms, we are now in a position to understand why 
a given psychical form, which happens to be present in 
active consciousness, summons in its wake one particular 
associate rather than another. Change in consciousness 
means only change in activity, and change in activity means 
a redistribution of the balancing elements. But the balanc- 
ing processes, which give rise to the momentary forms of 
consciousness, have already set up repeated immediate con- 
nections between that form which does the transferring and 
that which receives the transference. These connections be- 
tween various forms are more or less numerous and com- 
plete. Hence, while the reason in general why an idea is 
roused into active consciousness is because of the transfer- 
ence to it of certain movable elements, the reason in par- 
ticular why a specific idea arises is because : " The movable 
elements are always passed on from every active psychical 
form to that which is most strongly connected or is one with 

itr Zh 

§ 60. The Law Applied to the Old Laws of Association-r- 
The law just stated, taken in connection with what has been 
said as to the nature of the bond of union among ideas, 
throws new light upon, and puts some real meaning into, the 
old laws of the association of ideas. In general we may say 
that "the connection arising through coexistence is stronger 
than that through succession : for the latter arises indeed only 
through a partial and one-sided coexistence, namely, in that 
between the end of one psychical process and the beginning 
of the following. The connection between the properties of 

34 Cf. Lekrbuch, Chap. 3, II : " Richtung, in welcher die Uebertragung der Er- 
regtheit geschieht." 
^Lehrbuch, § 91. 



I J o FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [376 

a thing shapes it for our perceiving consciousness, for the 
most part, as an observed manifold coexistence ; the connec- 
tion of cause and effect, for the most part, as an observed 
manifold succession. The connection of what is given as 
joined spatially, if it is in general to have place for us, re- 
quires likewise a coexistence or succession for our perceiv- 
ing consciousness ; and as to the strength of this connection, 
therefore, this will depend on how often such conscious 
presentations have been produced by us coexistently or suc- 
ceeding one another. Similarity becomes analyzed into re- 
semblance and difference, whereby that which is different is 
given coexistent with the resembling parts ; and even the 
fundamental basis of permanent connections between like 
forms is in a certain measure to be referred to a coexistence. 
Contrast finally shows itself only by virtue of the similarity 
which lies at its basis as awakening principle." 36 

3 *Lehrbuch, § 92. 



CHAPTER V 
The Psychology of Outer Experience 

§ 61. Introduction — Beneke's doctrine of the perceptive 
consciousness brings out most sharply and clearly his psy- 
chological method, serving to distinguish it at once from the 
intuitive empiricism of his English predecessors and the 
metaphysical abstractness of the Germans. He does not 
attempt like some of the English to begin with simple sensa- 
tions and by the separation and combining of these try to 
build up the whole complex mental structure of the soul. 
Nor does he, on the hand, like some of the Germans, begin 
with the soul as an abstract unity or simple, and, from this 
metaphysical presupposition, endeavor to deduce or spin 
out to the minutest detail its complex inner organization. 
Experience, — outer experience, just as it presents itself to 
the developed soul — is his starting point. Analysis of imme- 
diate experience, just as the adult consciousness knows it, 
may lead to the hypothesis of simple sensations or impres- 
sions, some such as contended for by Locke, and by Hume ; 
and it may lead to the conception of the soul as some sort 
of a unity. But this much at least we may say, that psy- 
chology must not begin with these presuppositions. 

I OUTER EXPERIENCE : ORIGIN AND GROWTH OF PERCEPTS 

§ 62. Fundamental Characteristics of the Perceptive Con- 
sciousness — Outer experience, in the sense of the individual's 
perceptive consciousness, shows itself momentarily as a cer- 
tain complex, more or less clearly differentiated into lesser 
groups or individuals called things. These things, so far as 
377] in 



1 1 2 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [378 

they are perceived with some degree of clearness, whether 
they be visual, tactual, auditory, olfactory, or gustatory, may 
conveniently be called sense-perceptions, or simply percepts. 
The fundamental characteristics then of the perceptive con- 
sciousness are, first, that perceptions are always knowledge 
•of individual or particular things that are actually and im- 
mediately present, and, second, that these particular things 
are always perceived as existing in space, and, while re- 
garded as being something appearing to us, are yet regarded 
as having their stimulating cause without us. It is these indi- 
vidual facts of the perceptive consciousness, as well as the 
perceptive consciousness as a whole (t. e. regarded as that 
total immediate intuition which constitutes the individual's 
immediate momentary percept called outer experience) 
which psychology must investigate. 

§63. The Origin of Sense-Perceptions — We have already 
seen enough of Beneke's general standpoint to know that he 
does not attempt to trace back sense-perceptions to the 
organs of sense. Of these the adult consciousness knows 
immediately nothing, except so far as they are appearances in 
outer experience ; and, as appearances, or sense perceptions, 
they are the very things which are under investigation. But 
even when one has attained the phenomenalistic point of 
view, it is easy for the unreflective consciousness to persuade 
itself that its intuitions are ready-made products stamped 
upon it immediately in all their completeness from without. 
But careful reflection upon outer experience shows that sense 
perceptions are really very complex affairs. Perceptions, as 
well as concepts and the other individual facts of inner ex- 
perience, are a growth; so that percepts may exhibit all 
grades of liveliness {Starke), fixedness (Statigkeit) , clear- 
ness (Klarheit), and precision (Bestimmtheit) . "Attentive 
. reflection upon experience as it lies directly before us," says 
Beneke, " shows beyond doubt that sensuous impressions 



3 79] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE j Y 3 

and perceptions of the developed soul are by no means of so 
simple a nature. The sense experiences of children in the 
first weeks of their lives are manifestly different from the 
feelings and perceptions of the developed soul; and people 
born blind who have regained sight are as little able at first 
to form perceptions similar to ours." 1 We must therefore 
look for some further explanation of the clear intuitions of 
the perceptive consciousness. 

§ 64. Sense-Perceptions as Products of Subjective and Ob- 
jective Factors — In accounting for the growth of perceptive 
knowledge Beneke turns to great advantage his fundamental 
postulate as to the persistence of psychical forms. There 
can be no sense experience without a corresponding trace 
having been left in the inner being of the soul. When 
therefore similar sense experiences repeat themselves, they 
in consequence of the law of the mutual attraction of the 
similar, and the direct transference of movable elements, 
instantaneously call up into active consciousness all traces 
of elements similar to those which they contain. This ap- 
perceptive mass of traces fuses with the immediately excited 
sensuous feeling, and to this is due the clearness which the 
sensation on the presented side of consciousness possesses, 
while the apperceptive mass itself becomes refreshened or 
strengthened by the additional trace of the immediate per- 
ceptive experience. Thus then Beneke contends that " in 
order to the production -of clearly conscioiLS sense impres- 
sions, to the feeling freshly formed through immediate sen- 
suous excitation, there must come from the inner being of 
the soul something which corresponds individually and en- 
tirely to this feeling!'' 2 ' And what this something is, the pre- 
ceding analysis of the facts of inner experience has prepared 
us to understand. As to the growth of sense-perceptions, 

1 Lehrbuch, § 53. 2 Lehrbuch, § 54. 



! 1 4 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [380 

therefore, we may observe that " (in the case of the child 
first awakening to conscious life) the original sense impres- 
sions, though they maybe like, are still immeasurably fainter 
than those of the developed soul. But since like sensuous 
feelings (e. g. of a color, of a sound) are repeatedly formed, 
and since from all these forms traces are left in the inner be- 
ing of the soul, which then flow over to the like feelings 
aroused later; as a consequence, these must continually grow 
in strength, and thereby must sense impressions and percep- 
tions of the developed soul contain in themselves hundreds, 
yea thousands of just these psychical acts which in that 
original feeling were given only once." 3 " For every sense 
activity of the developed soul therefore," Beneke concludes, 
" there must properly speaking be two chief constituents 
working together: (1) A freshly formed sense impression, 
and (2) the similar traces contained in the inner being of 
the soul. Every sense-perception, consequently, however 
simple it may be in appearance, is in fact already an infinite 
complex."* 

§ 65. Nature and Meaning of " Original Sense-Impressions" 
— It is obvious, however, that any adequate accounting for 
the perceptive consciousness must say a good deal more 
about these " freshly formed sense impressions," — these so- 
called "original sensuous feelings" to the hypothesis of 
which analysis of outer experience seems to force us. While 
percepts, so far as involving numerous similar traces, may 
be regarded as a complex, which reveals this qualitative 
difference on the side of presented contents only quantita- 
tively, that is, by its strength or clearness, there is another 
kind of qualitative difference directly revealed in immediate 
consciousness. Even the simplest thing we can imagine is, 
as to content, a manifold, while the manifoldness of the in- 

3 Lehrbuch, § 55. 4 Lehrbuch, § 55, note 2. 



3 8 1 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE Y Y 5 

dividual things of outer experience as immediately present * 
in the momentary perceptive consciousness, as well as the 
manifoldness of the momentary perceptive consciousness as 
a whole, is constantly a matter of direct observation. This 
differentiated content or manifoldness of outer experience, 
therefore, demands some deeper explanation, and especially 
is this true of space perception, so far as involved in that 
clear circle of visual phenomena constituting the immediate 
kaleidoscopic field of view. So far as Hume attempted to 
supply this deeper explanation, he was led to the hypothesis 
of certain minima visibilia, minima tangibilia, and other 
" simple impressions," to which he assigned both qualitative 
and quantitative differences. Are the " freshly formed sense 
impressions" of Beneke to be regarded in the same way? 
Certainly there seems to be good ground for this assump- 
tion, Beneke would maintain, inasmuch as we can actually 
perceive most minute portions of space, actually feel most 
minute points, and simultaneously hear faint sounds, one of 
which obviously is of less volume than the others. The ob- 
vious facts of visual, tangible and other forms of sense per- 
ception, thus seem all to point to certain minimal forms of 
sensation or sensuous feeling. 

§ 66. Significance of Original Minimal Sensation as In- 
evitable Hypotheses — But Beneke differs from Locke, Berkeley 
and Hume, both in the character which he assigns to these 
original simple sense impressions as hypotheses, and also in 
his conception of the method by which we arrive at the 
knowledge of them. Simple sensations, as a matter of fact, 
are pure abstractions which are never realized in their iso- 
lated oneness in immediate experience. In their individu- 
ality they are not even psychological appearances, or pro- 
ducts for our outer consciousness. And yet outer experience 
is obviously a spatial manifold that is irresistibly perceived, 
as well as conceived, as made up of small portions or 



j 1 6 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [382 

spaces. But this is only to say that the soul itself, con- 
cretely considered, is a manifold ; and we have yet to under- 
stand how outer consciousness' arises at all. If simple 
sensations, or outer sense experience as a whole, are the 
product of impress from without the soul, it is obvious that 
since observation is confined entirely to consciousness, it is 
not open to immediate inspection how this change to con- 
sciousness has taken place. 5 It is at this point that Beneke, 
with great effect, avails himself of the distinction already set 
forth regarding changes to consciousness and changes in 
consciousness. 6 We have already seen the laws governing 
changes in consciousness. May we not explain changes to 
consciousness by analogy to these? If so, we may note that 
so far we have seen all psychical forms to be the product of 
factors. All the facts of inner experience, and even the 
clear percepts of the developed soul, have shown themselves 
to result from a conjunction between a trace, on the one 
hand, and certain stimulating elements on the other. Are 
we not justified then in regarding a freshly formed minimal 
impression likewise as such a product? 

§67. Beneke 's Doctrine of Primary Powers (Urvermogeri) 

5 Mr. Stout, in the critical article already referred to (Cf. p. 99, note), cer- 
tainly does Beneke an injustice when he says (p. 26) : " Now, Beneke was any- 
thing rather than judicious. He claimed with reason the right of framing 
hypotheses to explain observed facts. But he pushed his hypotheses far beyond 
what the exigencies of psychological explanation required. Worse than this, he 
regarded some of his most arbitrary theories, e.g., the appropriation of stimulants 
by faculties, as directly based on the evidence of introspection." If this means 
to say that Beneke regarded the appropriation of external stimulants a matter of 
direct introspection, this is in error, for Beneke expressly and emphatically says it 
is impossible to have immediate knowledge of the process of awaking to con- 
sciousness (Cf. Lehrbuch, § 87 and 20, also supra, § 41). If it means to say that 
we have a deduced or mediate knowledge of this process, reached on the basis of 
certain immediate knowledge of processes directly observed to take place in con- 
sciousness, then the " arbitrariness " of the hypothesis is not altogether apparent. 

6 Cf. supra, § 41. 



383] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 1 j 

— It is this conception of minimal sense impressions as psy- 
chical products or phenomena that leads Beneke to the most 
fundamental hypothesis of his whole theory. In the case of 
these original sense impressions, Beneke calls that factor 
which comes from the soul a "primary power" {Urver- 
m'dgeri) or faculty ; that which comes from without the soul, 
a " stimulant" (Reiz). Since now the soul is continuously 
being stimulated from without, and since the sense impres- 
sions so produced are, in consequence of a partial with- 
drawal of the stimulation, continually lapsing into traces, the 
primary powers are, as it were, ever being used up, so that, 
for the production of every fresh sensuous impression, a 
fresh primary power is needed. Consequently, argues Be- 
neke, " for the complete explanation of the life of our souls, 
we must take as a basis just as many sensuous primary pow- 
ers (sinnliche Urverm'ogen) as in the course of life there have 
been formed elementary sensuous feelings {sinnliche Empfin- 
dungen) ."' 

§ 68. Third Fundamental Psychological Process-- — We are 
now in a position to understand what Beneke states as really 
the most fundamental of all the psychological processes : 

" Sensuous impressions and perceptions are formed by the 
human soul in consequence of impressions or stimulants which 
affect it from without!' 8 

II OUTER EXPERIENCE : OBJECTIVE RELATIONS OF PERCEPTS 

§ 69. Introduction — The most important phases of the 
psychological problem involved in the explanation of outer 
experience yet remain to be considered. In the first place, 
the immediate perceptive consciousness presents itself as a 
manifold of spatially related elements, and we must, there- 
fore, attempt to determine the nature of the objective rela- 

7 Lehrbuch, § 56. 8 Ibid., § 22. Beneke's " first " fundamental process. 



1 1 8 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [384 

tions among such inter-connected phenomena. In the 
second place, the mosaic of immediate sense-perception is 
continuously undergoing kaleidoscopic changes, and we 
must, therefore, attempt to account for these panoramic 
transformations. The latter question will be considered in 
the following chapter. 

§ 70. Nature of the Problem — Preceding psychological 
doctrines, we have seen, left entirely without answer the 
question why external consciousness at any given moment 
is a certain complex, more or less immediately differentiated 
into lesser groups or complexes. So far as Hume con- 
sidered this problem, we have seen that he regarded the 
immediate manifold of sense-perception as made up of cer- 
tain mimima visibilia, minima tangibilia, etc., but with the 
result of reducing outer experience to an empirical chaos. 
" Simple impressions " were regarded by Hume not merely 
as distinguishable, but, consequently, as separable ; and so 
wide was their separation, and so utter their isolation, as to 
lead him to say, " I do not think there are any two distinct 
impressions which are inseparably conjoined." 9 But the 
inconceivability of how minimal colored points, sounds, 
touches, etc., if actually entirely separated and discrete, 
could yield experience or consciousness, such as we know 
it, only forces to the sharpest issue the question how we are 
to conceive the connections which we actually perceive to 
subsist among the manifold elements of sense. 

§71. Objective Relations Depend on Original Organic Re- 
lations of the Primary Powers — Beneke's conception of the 
nature of the objective relations of the perceptive conscious- 
ness marks his most characteristic difference from, and great 
point of advance on, the whole advanced psychology of his 
day, English and German. Similarly to Hume, we have 

9 Treatise of Human Nature, p. 66. 



385] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE 1 j g 

found Beneke postulating certain original or freshly formed 
sense impressions. But even these simple impressions, as 
hypotheses, are hypotheses of phenomenal existences. As 
phenomenal then they must be regarded as the product of 
factors, or the result of a process, of which, they if they were 
actually to enter clear conscious experience, would be the 
mere elementary appearance. When therefore we speak of 
the perceptive consciousness of the adult individual as hav- 
ing resulted from a long series of infinitely repeated original 
sense impressions, we must be careful to remember that the 
real existence or being is, on the one hand, the primary 
powers of the soul, on the other, the stimulants external to 
these powers, to the conjunction of which simple sense im- 
pressions correspond. It is the inevitableness of these 
hypotheses that leads Beneke's concrete mind boldly to con- 
clude that the soul, before it awoke to consciousness, already 
possessed an organic structural unity in the shape of these 
interrelated, numerically distinct, primary powers. For he 
contends, " these primary powers certainly not only in the 
organic whole of the soul's being (im Ganzen des Seelenseins) , 
but also in the collective activity of each sense, are bound 
together in the most intimate union ; nevertheless they must 
be regarded as sundered or separated from one another, in so 
far as they are able, on the one hand, to enter the field of 
sensation, in consequence of special connection with the 
stimulant appropriated by each, on the other, to persist in 
this connection in the inner being of the soul." 10 It is, there- 
fore, in virtue of this original organic connection between the 
primary powers of the different senses, and between the in- 
dividual's sense system as a whole, that a certain objectivity 
and reality attaches to the interconnections of the manifold 
which is immediately and successively presented in our per- 
ceptive consciousness. 

l0 Lehrbuch, § 56. 



1 20 FRIEDRICH ED UA RD BENEKE [386 

§ 72. Objective and Subjective Connections Distinguished — 
These original objective connections involved in immediate 
outer conscious experience are of course to be distinguished 
from those so-called purely subjective connections which 
later in and through experience arise between groups and 
series of presentations. While Beneke regarded both as 
"something real in the inner being of the soul," he neverthe- 
less distinguishes them by the supposition that the former 
are originally given, whereas the latter arise through that 
balancing process or transference which takes place entirely 
within the realm of the individual soul. Thus he says : 
" The transference of conscious activity is governed by the 
connections between psychical forms, or their degree of one- 
ness. But these connections are either already given origi- 
nally (in the soul only between the primary powers of one 
and the same system, in the body variously and between 
several systems), or are first formed later (through the im- 
mediate transference of balancing elements)." 11 

11 Lehrbuch, § 308. 



CHAPTER VI 

Conclusions Relating to both Inner and Outer 
Conscious Experience 

i the character and kinds of active consciousness 

§ 73. Character of Consciousness as Determined by Meth- 
ods of Excitation — The most fundamental distinction of im- 
mediate conscious experience so far recognized has been 
that between outer and inner. The basis for this distinction 
we now see lies in the method of excitation to active con- 
sciousness. In general, however, as Beneke points out, 1 we 
are able to distinguish three modes by which psychical forms 
are aroused into active consciousness: 1) purely inner; 2^ 
purely outer ; 3) that through the process of transference or 
balancing. In the case of this last method, the direction 
which conscious activity will take becomes determined by 
the connections of that group of percepts or ideas which on 
each occasion is actually present in immediate active con- 
sciousness. The second method, depending on an outer im- 
press or stimulant, is the only one that in and for itself is. 
without any coherency with the previous being of the soul 
(conscious or unconscious), and consequently the only one 
through which the direction of the soul's activity can be di- 
rectly and arbitrarily changed. The first method, depend- 
ing on the presence in the soul of still unappropriated prim- 
ary powers, which exert an attractive influence on the similar 
traces of which the inner being of the soul consists, is the 

J Lehrbuch, § 306. 
387] 121 



I2 2 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [388 

basis of voluntary action, and so calls for more detailed 
statement. 

§ 74. The Nature of Voluntary Action — So far we have 
learned of two kinds of psychical elements, the original 
primary powers of the soul, and the stimulants taken up 
from without. The function of this latter has been, through 
partial separation from the original primary powers by 
which they have been appropriated, to serve as "transferable 
elements," by which, in the ensuing balancing process, other 
similar psychical forms or powers become aroused. Beneke 
assigns a like function to some of the still unfilled primary 
powers. They too can be transferred to similar forms, al- 
ready existing as* unconscious possessions of the soul, and 
can arouse these to active consciousness. They, thus, are 
the foundation of voluntary action. " The difference be- 
tween the two species of elements just mentioned," says 
Beneke, " shows itself moreover also in the reproductions 
which manifestly are grounded on them. The enhancing 
which becomes effected through stimulants (Reize) alone, is 
the ground of that fresher, thoroughly involuntary arising of 
perceptions and other psychical forms ; that through free 
primary powers alone, the ground of the intense voluntary 
arising; that resulting from the mixture of both, the ground 
of the usual intermediate arising." 2 

The essential nature of voluntary action thus consists in 
being the direct cause either of introducing into active con- 
sciousness a form not actually and actively present, or of 
retaining in active consciousness a form already aroused. 
The most important function of volition then is in deciding 
the direction which active consciousness shall take. The will 
is of course determined^ in the sense that, since the primary 
powers in general draw to them those similar forms which 
are most strongly connected, it is dependent on the inner 

1 Lehrbuch, § 90. 



389] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE i 2 $ 

organization of the soul as previously formed. 3 But its ac- 
tion differs radically from the involuntary stimulation of the 
balancing elements, in that the direction of consciousness, 
when the change taking place results from the transference 
of balancing elements, is already predetermined by the con- 
nections of those conscious forms which at the given mo- 
ment are actually and actively present in immediate con- 
scious experience (outer or inner). 

§ 75. Character of Consciousness as Determined by the 
Kinds of Primary Powers Active — Actually aroused sensa- 
tions, as distinguished for consciousness, that is, on the side 
of their presented contents, may also be classified with refer- 
ence to those various sub-systems of primary powers of 
which the soul is supposed originally to consist. Beneke 
thus divides sensations into three great classes : 4 1 ) Organ- 
empfindungen, which arise from those specific kinds of primary 
powers that constitute the five special senses, the character- 
istics of which are that they " stand immediately open to the 
outer world," and have corporeal representatives called 
"organs;" 2) Vital- empfindungen (including sensations of 
heat and cold, pressure, and other partially unknown pleas- 
urable moods, etc.), which for all sensuous primary powers 
are alike, or at least only quantitatively different; 3) 
Empfindungen in the digestive organs and in the rest of the 
inner bodily systems, including sensations which accompany 
the movements of muscles. Sensations of the third class, 
Beneke observes, are somewhat intermediate between those 
of the first and second. Indeed sensations of the second 
and third classes are not only so much alike for the most 
part that the same word does service for both, but in gen- 
eral the fundamental basis of their production is the same. 
" For the stimulants from which sensations of the third class 
arise, although given immediately in the body, are in like 

3 Cf. Lehrbuch, § 306. * Lehrbuch, § 67. 



124 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [390 

manner outer to the power ( Vermogen) which experiences 
the sensation."* 

§ j6. Immediate Consciousness as Determined by the Rela- 
tion of Power and Stimulant — Actually present sensations, 
or, more exactly, any fact of immediate conscious experi- 
ence, outer or inner, may further be classified for conscious- 
ness, as dependent on the quantitative relation between the 
two factors, power and stimulant, of which it is the product. 
This relation has no unimportant influence on conscious 
products, and especially upon what Beneke would term their 
" form." If we were carefully to examine those changes to 
active consciousness which take place in consciousness, that 
is those changes which are open to immediate observation, 
we should find that we might distinguish five different forms 
of consciousness, attributable to five varying quantitative 
degrees in which the exciting stimulus and appropriating 
power may combine. 6 

1. The stimulation may be partial — In this case the ex- 
citing stimulant, or movable elements, are too weak to fill 
completely the appropriating trace or psychical form. On 
the side of consciousness we have the phenomenon of a feel- 
ing of dissatisfaction or dislike, accompanied by a longing 
for completer stimulation. 

2. The stimulation may be exactly commensurate with the 
appropriating capacity of the trace. In this case neither 
factor exceeds the other. This is the fundamental form for 
clear representation. 

3. The stimulant is of marked fulness, or overflowing 
without being immediately excessive. This results in an 
immediate feeling of pleasure. 

4. The stimulation may gradually become excessive. The 
result in consciousness is a feeling of satiety, or blunted 
appetite. 

5 Lehrbuch, § 67. 6 Cf. Lehrbuch, § 58. 



3 9 1 J FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 2 5 

5. An excessive stimulation may combine with an appro- 
priating power too suddenly. This sudden overstimulation 
is the basis of the phenomena of pain. 

In consequence, then, of this varying relation between 
stimulant and appropriating trace, Beneke recognizes five 
fundamental constructive forms, and on the basis of analogy, 
concludes that these forms prove operative also in the case 
of the external stimulant (der Reiz) and the appropriating 
primary power (Urvermogen) . All these conscious phe- 
nomena, excepting the second, it will be noticed, are emo- 
tional products, although the first, in its aspect of a striving 
after full stimulation, reveals what Beneke regarded as an 
essential characteristic of volitional action. 

§77. The Threefold Nature of Consciousness — Notwith- 
standing his recognition of five fundamental constructive 
forms, Beneke fully and clearly recognized the essentially 
similar emotional character of certain of these, and so ex- 
pressly accepted the threefold classification of consciousness 
into cognitions (Vorstellungen), feelings, (Gefuhlen) ? and 
volitions (Strebungen) . n With Beneke, however, these dis- 
tinctions are not the most fundamental. The deepest dis- 
tinction is that between primary power \Urvermogen) and 
stimulant (Reize). The primary power, it is true, already 
implies these distinctions. For originally it is a striving or 
impulse (Strebung) after stimulation. In the appropriating 
of the stimulant consciousness arises, which, on the side of 
presented contents, will be either a feeling (Gefiihl) or a 
clear presentation (Vorstellung), as dependent on the in- 
tensity of relation between the two original elements. 

7 Beneke's analysis of feeling and volition is really perhaps the most important 
of his whole special psychology. The general plan of the present work, however, 
has prevented adequate treatment of these subjects, which must be left to other 
investigators. Cf. lehrbuch, Chapters 6 and 7; also Psychologische Skizzen. 



1 2 6 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE f^g 2 

II THE SPAN OF IMMEDIATE CONSCIOUSNESS 
§ 78. Introduction — Conscious experience, outer and inner, 
as it reveals itself to the immediate observation of the indi- 
vidual, is exceedingly limited and finite in character. So 
far as attention is concentrated on visual phenomena, outer 
experience is never more than that pictorial circle of clear 
consciousness which constitutes our immediate field of view ; 
while in such a case, inner experience is those immediate 
images, concepts, or judgments directly aroused by the 
picture before us. The question here to be considered is 
not that raised by later psychologists as to how many things 
can be attended to at once, but rather why in general the 
limited circle of clear consciousness, outer and inner, does 
not immediately and clearly represent the whole rich mani- 
fold of the soul's being. 

§ 79. The Span of Inner Consciousness — If, as Beneke 
maintains, even the poorest equipped human soul contains 
within it an endless multitude of inner traces, why do not 
these traces all become conscious at once? In Beneke's 
opinion, " in and for themselves they could all become con- 
scious at once." 8 But we must remember from the preced- 
ing analysis that all conscious or active processes of the 
developed soul arose from unconscious or unexcited psychical 
existences, because of a transference to them of certain mov- 
able or stimulating elements. There are, therefore, three 
reasons why all traces do not become consciously active at 
once: 

First, 9 because of an insufficient quantum of movable 
elements. A chief source of internal excitation, as we have 
seen, is the transference or balancing of the movable ele- 
ments, but these stimulating elements (largely because of 

8 Lehrbuck, § 305. 

9 Cf. Lehrbuck, § 93, note 2; also, § 220. 



393] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 2 y 

the limited character of immediate outer conscious experi- 
ence, the main source of them), are not given in sufficient 
quantity to go round. 

Second, 10 because the quantum becomes so diffused that 
none of the forms, even of a closely connected group or 
series, attains to full (clear) consciousness. It often hap- 
pens that the transference is not strong enough to bring 
about complete consciousness. Consciousness varies thus 
from the perfect clearness attendant on complete concentra- 
tion, through half conscious states, to that of utter absent- 
mindedness and perplexing confusion, in which properly 
speaking nothing is clearly conscious. 

Third, 11 because of the partial opposition of psychical 
forms. That totally different psychical forms can exist 
simultaneously side by side in consciousness is perfectly 
obvious at every glance of the eye. Our percept of the 
outer world (outer experience) is at every moment such a 
unity of differing or opposing forms, while the conceptive 
consciousness (inner experience) at almost every stage is a 
conscious state whose characteristic is multiplicity in unity. 
Opposing or differing psychical forms, therefore, do not, as 
Herbart claimed, tend to keep each other from rising to 
consciousness, but only limit each other in consciousness. 12 
That is, while heterogeneous percepts remain outside one 
another, their similar elements, in consequence of the first 
fundamental psychological process, tend to coalesce, and so 
far as they do this, we have a clearer consciousness. In 
this sense, opposing forms exclude each other, but they do 
it in consciousness, and by drawing attention to clearest 
consciousness. 

Insufficient quantity, then, stimulating of elements, too great 

10 Cf. Lehrbuch, § 93. » Ibid., § 305. 

12 Beneke calls attention to this as one of his most fundamental differences 
from Herbart. Cf. Lehrbuch, § 305, note. 



1 2 8 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE ["394 

diffusion of these elements, the partial opposition of coexist- 
ing heterogeneous forms, may all account for the limited 
span of inner conscious experience. 

§ 80. The Span of Outer Consciousness — As in the case of 
inner experience the question arises, why all the infinite traces 
with which the soul is stored do not arise into active con- 
sciousness at once, so a pressing psychological question in 
respect to this system of innumerable primary powers postu- 
lated by Beneke, is why all the unappropriated primary pow- 
ers of which the soul consists are not stimulated at once. A 
perhaps more exact statement of this question would be — 
why are these primary powers not all clearly represented in 
immediate conscious experience? Clear consciousness, 
however, we have seen, arises chiefly because of the simul- 
taneous excitation of the numerous similar traces which cor- 
respond to and give clearness to any immediately stimulated 
primary power. Immediate sensuous experience is possible, 
according to Beneke, only when a still unappropriated pri- 
mary power is actually entering into relation with the external 
stimulant. 13 If then at any given moment our field of view 
is restricted to a particularly narrow circle ; if at any given 
moment, the volume of sound is less extensive than on other 
occasions, this is because fewer primary powers belonging to 
each of these systems are being actually and immediately stim- 
ulated from without. And, where this is so, the whole reason 
in general is that the amount of immediate outer stimula- 
tion is not enough to excite all the primary powers. As a 
fact of immediate observation, apparently only a certain few 
of the primary systems are at work at a given time. This is 
strikingly true in the case of sleep, where most of the so- 
called outer senses are almost entirely inactive. And this 
relation between our sleeping and waking moments is so 

13 " Only by means of still unfilled primary powers can the soul take up imme- 
diate imprints from without." Lehrbuch, § 56, note. 



395] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE 1 2 9 

closely connected with the question of the span of conscious- 
ness as to call for more detailed consideration. 

§81. The Relation between Sleep and Waking™ — Beneke, 
in his explanation of the phenomenon of change from sleep 
to waking, turns to most ingenious use his distinction of ac- 
tivity and inactivity of the primary powers and systems. Our 
sleeping and waking moments are to be distinguished in 
general by the fact that under each of these circumstances 
" various systems of the soul's being are active or aroused: 
in waking moments, those senses from which the higher con- 
scious psychical forms arise and with which the muscular 
system is connected, i. e., those which are capable of a vol- 
untary movement ; in sleep, the vital processes, or assimil- 
ating activities of the body, by means of which takes place 
the appropriation of the material consumed for their nour- 
ishment. Other systems, like the circulatory, respiratory, 
and that of digestion, show themselves active in both cases." 15 
Beneke therefore assigns a positive and a secondary charac- 
ter to sleep. " The essential nature of sleep, or its funda- 
mental positive characteristic, accordingly, is to be regarded 
merely as the ruling activity of the appropriating powers of the 
body. Everything else, even the discontinuance or limitation 
of (clearly) conscious processes, is only secondary and unes- 
sential!™ 

§ 82. Why the Activity of Various Systems Monopolizes 
Immediate Consciousness — Even though it be conceded that 
the character of immediate consciousness is determined 
primarily by that group of primary powers which is being 
immediately excited by external stimulants, the question 
still remains why at any given time the ruling activity should 
belong to any special group or number of such powers. In 

14 Cf. Lehrbuch, (ch. 8, II., 2) : " Verhaltniss zwischen Wachen und Schlaf." 

15 Lehrbuch, § 312. 16 Lehrbuch, § 312, note 2. 



1 3 o FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE [396 

particular we may ask: (1) Why in waking moments the 
activity of the bodily powers is obviously suppressed or 
overshadowed by that of the higher senses, or (e. g. where 
one becomes so lost in abstract thought as to be perfectly 
oblivious of surroundings [immediate outer experience] ) by 
that of the higher spiritual powers? (2) Why it is quite 
possible, at times, for the more spiritual processes, which are 
really the clearest or strongest (Starksten) of all, to suc- 
cumb to the vital processes, the faintest of all ? 

The first question Beneke answers in a simple way. Traces 
become traces by a partial disappearance of the stimulant. 
For a permanent existence of a trace at least some of the 
original stimulant must remain appropriated by the primary 
power. On the basis of the varying degrees of completeness 
with which stimulants are retained by the primary powers, 
Beneke assigns to the latter varying grades of activity 
(Kraftigkeit) . 17 In this respect the primary assimilating 
powers of the body are least active of all. They therefore 
are the furthest removed from the spiritual powers, and " are 
therefore the least fitted to enter into connections with these. 
As result of which, consequently, both these classes of pow- 
ers are able to operate at one and the same time with the 
greatest difficulty, and the assimilating powers of the body 
in waking moments of necessity become overwhelmingly 
suppressed." 18 

The answer to the second question furnishes an ingenious 
explanation of the phenomenon of sleep. " Active conscious- 
ness, as we have become persuaded," says Beneke, " is a 
complex process, for which at every moment we require new 
nourishment. This can be obtained for it only either by 
still unfilled primary powers adding themselves to it, or by 
means of external stimulants, the taking up of which is like- 

17 lehrbuch, § 33. 18 Lehrbuch y § 313. 



397*1 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE \ 3 1 

wise conditioned by the presence of still unfilled primary 
powers. But now for every sensuous feeling or perception 
a special primary power is consumed; 19 and in as much as 
that which'is consumed is replaced during waking moments, 
perhaps not all or at any rate only in slight measure, a time 
must come in which all the unfilled primary powers become 
employed or worked up, and in consequence of this, con- 
sciousness discontinues, not from pressure of that fainter 
power, but in itself."™ This is why we can feel ourselves 
unable to see or hear, etc., and can actually perceive, or feel,, 
sleep coming on. 

§ 83. Fourth Fundamental Psychological Process — The 
attempt at philosophical explanation of sleep, as just given, 
points to the most hypothetical and therefore most criticised 
of all ,the fundamental psychological processes contended for 
by Beneke, — the formation of new primary powers. This 
process, given second in his list, is stated by him as follows: 
" The human soul is constantly acquiring new primary pow- 
ers.""* 1 In this consists the " innermost life process" of the 
soul. The nature of this process, more, even the fact of it, 
is by no direct means known to us. We can only postulate 
its operation as the most plausible hypothesis to account for 
the obvious exhaustion of certain systems of primary pow- 
ers, this exhaustion varying all the way from diminished ac- 
tivity, such as is exhibited in the phenomena of fatigue, to 
absolute inability, as manifested in sleep, to form any sense 
perceptions or higher active psychical forms. 

19 Great caution is needed in understanding this expression. Beneke does not 
mean that a primary power in becoming appropriated ceases to be. The primary- 
powers still continue to exist, but in modified form. To say that they are " used 
up" is simply to say that they are worked up into a structural form. 

™Lehrbuch, § 314. 21 Lehrbuch, § 24. 



!32 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [398 

III THE NATURE AND MEANING OF CONSCIOUSNESS 22 

§ 84. Introduction — The desideratum of stamping precise 
meanings on the various uses of the term consciousness, a 
word also in his day open to the most varying philosophical 
interpretation of all, was expressly recognized by Beneke, 
and his attempt to meet this desideratum resulted in that 
most profound philosophical distinction which promises to 
prove perhaps the most permanent achievement of his 
whole psychology. This distinction, as we have seen, is 
that between consciousness as a product, i. e. y consciousness 
on the side of its presented contents — immediate experience 
of the individual as it lies before him open to direct ob- 
servation — and consciousness as a process, i. e., conscious- 
ness on the side of its presentative activity — an activity which, 
as the preceding psychological analysis has attempted to 
show, is involved in every individual conscious fact, whether 
of inner or outer experience. 



§ 85. Consciousness Distinguished as Presented Contents — 
The general character of the presented contents of imme- 
diate momentary consciousness, as it presents itself in the 
experience of the individual, the preceding analysis has 
already sufficiently described. The most fundamental de- 
scription of the phenomena of life is that which distinguishes 
them into ''outer" and "inner," referring the former to 
matter or body, the latter to self or soul. In the variegated 
and incessant alterations which the phenomenal conscious- 

2 'For the full discussion of this subject compare: Lehrbuch, Ch. 3, I.; Ch. 8, 
II.; also Die neue Psychologie, Sechster Aufsatz: " Ueber das Menschlichen 
Bewusstsein." 

23 1 have borrowed the terminology " presented contents " and " presentative ac- 
tivity " from Mr. Stout. Compare the article already referred to (Mind, January, 
1889. 



399] FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE ^^ 

ness undergoes, this limited consciousness, so far as adult, 
readily distinguishes its experiences further into three great 
classes : Cognitions, Feelings, Volitions. One may become 
absorbed in clear sense perception, lost in deep feeling, or 
intently engaged in continuous action (doing or thinking). 
Each individual conscious state of this sort has its particu- 
lar object or content. Except so far as such concepts are 
intuitively implied in these conscious experiences, these 
states do not know themselves as cognitive, emotional or 
volitional. It is only a new, succeeding or subsequent state 
which makes the concept explicit, that is, knows conscious- 
ness to have been engaged in any one of the ways described. 
It is through these subsequent, reflective, knowing states, 
becoming in their turn part of the presented contents of 
other subsequent new states, that we gain the concept of 
such a thing as an idea, and ultimately the concept of inner 
experience. 

§ 86. Grades of Clearness of Presented Contents — Much of 
the confusion attendant on the use of the word conscious- 
ness is due to the failure to keep clear the distinction be- 
tween kinds of presented contents, and grades of clearness of 
presented contents. So far as we intuitively apprehend par- 
ticular given experiences as cognitions, feelings, or volitions, 
such experiences have attained to no small degree of clear- 
ness ; and some particular experience thus may be decidedly 
clear qua cognition, feeling, or volition, and yet in compar- 
ison with various kinds of these great classes, decidedly ob- 
scure. Hence immediate consciousness appears to vary 
from states where the whole content is one vague undifferent- 
iated extensive sensation (probably never existent except in 
the most incipient stages of infancy, and only approximated 
to in adult life either when consciousness is submerged in 
some overmastering pain, or when all clearness is removed 
from it by complete distraction or perplexity), through 



I3 4 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [40O 

states where certain parts, in a penumbra of more or less 
clear consciousness, are discriminated as vague or perplex- 
ing sensations, to states where the contents are characterized 
by the most perfect qualitative clearness. It is this distinc- 
tion of grades of clearness, indeed, which has become crys- 
tallized in ordinary language in the use of the word con- 
sciousness, and which is the great source of confusion 
respecting it. Even Beneke himself frequently lapses into 
this ordinary use, e. g., when he says that " sensations of the 
soul first awaking to life are not conscious, and therefore we 
cannot attribute consciousness to the human soul or an in- 
born faculty."™ But what he must mean here, and in fact 
what he intends to say, is only that " consciousness," in the 
sense of clear consciousness, is not innate. Beneke, too, 
speaks of the later clear consciousness of the child develop- 
ing itself from original " unconscious " sensations. But 
here again this is only a most relative method of expression, 
which for scientific and philosophical purposes is vicious, 
just because it obscures distinctions really of the utmost 
value for a true insight into the nature and implications of 
conscious life. The obscurest sensation, so far as it forms 
part of the immediate contents of some individual experi- 
ence, in that it is a fact in and for some experiencing indi- 
vidual, is as truly "conscious" as the clearest sense percept 
or concept which ever engaged the closest attention of that 
individual. 

§87. "Unconsciousness" Distinguished as (1) Less Clear 
and as (2) Non-presented Contents — There are really then 
two meanings which we may assign to the term " uncon- 
scious," from the point of view of presented contents. 

First, as stated in the last paragraph, it may refer to per- 
ceptive (external) or conceptive (internal) facts, immedi- 

^Lehrbuch, §57. 



40 1 1 FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE j 3 5 

ately present in conscious experience, but of so vague a 
character as to admit of only some such characterization as 
" sensation," " feeling," " external," " internal," etc. In other 
words, in this sense, the use of the term is purely relative, 
referring to more or less qualitatively clear actually pres- 
ented contents. 

Second, "unconscious" may refer to percepts (things) 
and to concepts (ideas) not present in immediate conscious 
experience at all. This second use calls for further careful 
discrimination. For these things or ideas either (a) may 
have already once formed part of the immediate contents of 
a given individual's consciousness, but at a given moment 
may not be present ; or (b) they may have never at all en- 
tered into the conscious experience of the individual. In 
the first case, I may be said to be utterly " unconscious" of 
those of my friends who are neither immediately present to 
my perceptive consciousness nor are present in my thoughts. 
In the second case, I maybe said to be utterly "uncon- 
scious" even of the existence of thousands of people whom, 
though they live in the same city with me, I have never 
either seen or heard of. There is a vast difference in the 
meaning of "unconsciousness" in these two cases. The last 
one does not and cannot even exist as a problem for the in- 
dividual whose experience is thus, as to certain individual 
facts, regarded as a perfect blank. It can exist only for a 
second individual who knows both the particular facts and 
the condition of that mind supposed not to be possessed of 
the facts. The first case, on the other hand, raises what has 
proved one of the most troublesome questions in all philoso- 
phy — the question of the existence and nature of what has 
once been the object- of consciousness, when that object is 
not actually perceived. And Beneke's general theory is 
permanently valuable just because of the light which it 
throws on this question. 



!36 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [402 

B CONSCIOUSNESS AS PRESENTATIVE PROCESS 

§ 88. Consciousness Distinguished as Presentative Activity 
— Beneke gets at the very heart of the difficulty involved in 
the problem stated in the last paragraph by his distinction 
between presented contents and presentative activity. The 
result of the preceding psychological analysis has been to 
show that every momentary or substantive state of con- 
sciousness, whatever its phenomenalistic aspect may be, 
is to be regarded as a sort of static condition or equilibrium,, 
resulting from the balancing or equalizing of certain ele- 
ments — each pulse or alteration of consciousness being only 
a disturbance of the old and a readjusting to the new equi- 
librium. The factors of this balancing process in the case 
of outer perception are really three : ( 1 ) External Stimu- 
lants (Reize), (2) Primary Powers (Urvermogeti) , and (3) 
Traces {Spur en). In the case of inner perception the factors 
are two: (1) Traces 25 and (2) Movable Elements; or, (1) 
Traces, and (2) Unfilled Primary Powers. The immediate 
momentary consciousness of individual experience then, 
whatever its presented contents, is the direct product of 
certain primary powers which, together with their corres- 
ponding and connected traces, are being directly stimulated 
or aroused. Immediate consciousness, from this point of 
view, thus means only actual excitation (Die Erregtheit), 
that is, the immediate activity of certain psychical forms. 

§ 89. Clear Consciousness as a Grade of Presentative 
Activity — We are now in a position to understand more 
fully the effect on the contents of consciousness of the de- 
gree of activity represented by the relation between primary 

25 Traces, it will of course be remembered, are supposed to be fundamentally 
only certain primary powers, or groups of such powers, which have appropriated 
external stimulants, and from which this stimulant has become partially disen- 
gaged. 



403 J FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 3 j 

powers and their stimulants. We have already described 
the general character of consciousness, or the constructive 
psychical forms resulting from the varying relation of power 
and stimulant. It is the purpose here to look more closely 
at the nature of clear consciousness, so far as dependent on 
presentative activity. The soul in its original nature or 
being, we have seen to be a vast system of primary powers 
all organically combined in one concrete whole. The 
simplest original sensation, that is, the simplest " appear- 
ance " in consciousness, arises only when the primary power 
is stimulated by means of a stimulant from without. But 
when once a stimulant has been taken up from without, it 
continues its existence henceforth as a permanent possession 
of the soul. It has become entirely psychological in char- 
acter. This of course does not mean that it is always 
clearly represented in consciousness, but only tha;t there 
always remains as a permanent possession of. the soul the 
primary power and stimulant in a more or less firm con- 
nection. And this " permanent possession " continues to 
exist as a trace, having so become by a partial disappear- 
ance of the stimulant. So far as similar traces become 
multiplied in the soul, these traces, in consequence of the 
fundamental psychological processes, become closely knitted 
together as a group, which group, when active, becomes, on 
the side of presented contents, represented in consciousness 
as a single act. Now " the word clearness" (Klarheit) , says 
Beneke, " means in general, nothing more than that which 
arises as product from the fusion of many similar psychical 
products of the same fundamental form." 26 Clear conscious- 
ness hence " develops itself out of the original sensations, 
without requiring anything new or foreign to be brought to 
it, by virtue of the mere aggregation of like elements and 

26 Lehrbuch, § 60. 



j 3 8 FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE [404 

the strengthening (Verstdrkung) thereby resulting!'' 1 ' 1 And 
Beneke, therefore, gives as his ultimate definition of clear 
consciousness '* strength of psychical being " (Starke des 
psychischen Seins). 28 

§ 90. Grades of Presentative Activity — In the case of the 
developed soul we may distinguish four important grades of 
activity conditioning the production or failure to produce 
clear consciousness : 

1st. Where the stimulation is great enough to bring a 
certain psychical form into active consciousness, but the 
given form, in consequence of the fewness of similar traces, 
becomes in consciousness not a clear presentation (Vorstel- 
lungsbildung), but a mere vague sensuous feeling (Sinnliche 
Empfindung). 

2d. Where, although the soul is supplied with traces of 
similar forms sufficient to result in clear representation, the 
balancing elements, or quantity of stimulants, becomes so 
dispersed™ through the great number of parts of an intercon- 
nected group or series, that no one part is brought into 
clear consciousness. It is by this diffusion of excitation 
( Vertheilung der Erregtheii) that Beneke explains the dis- 
tracted and perplexed states of the total immediate con- 
sciousness (or even of partial consciousness) already de- 
scribed. 

3d. Where the soul is both furnished with sufficient traces, 
and the balancing elements are at work in sufficient quantity, 
to arouse or actively excite these traces. This is the condi- 
tion of ordinary clear presentations, 

4th. Where clear consciousness arises from the partial op- 
position of forms immediately present in consciousness, and 
reaches a certain maximum or perfect clearness. In this 

27 Ibid., §57. 28 Ibid., §57, note 1. 

29 Cf. Lehrbuch, § 93, note. Also § 161. 



40 5 ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 3 9 

case the clear consciousness arises from the obscuration or 
darkening of forms immediately present. For example, 
where momentary consciousness, divided between several per- 
cepts, say a red, a white, and a blue ball, at almost the same 
instant, irresistibly and almost to the exclusion of the objects 
named, becomes focussed or centred on the concept " color." 
§ 91. " Unconsciousness" Distinguished as N on- Ex citation 
— We are now able to assign some intelligible meaning to 
that use of the term " unconsciousness," which has already 
been defined as the non-presence in immediate conscious- 
ness of things or ideas which " have already once formed 
part of the immediate contents of a given individual con- 
sciousness." Unconsciousness, in this sense means simply 
the non-excitation or inadequate excitation of elements 
already existing and forming part of the being of the soul. 
Traces, whether consisting of partially stimulated individual 
primary powers, or groups of such powers, are " uncon- 
scious" in this sense, /'. e., so far as their stimulation is too 
slight to give them clear representation in immediate con- 
scious experience. It thus results that the only absolute or 
"true consciousness" is unconsciousness in the sense of 
utter non-excitation, and this can be only in the case of the 
unappropriated primary powers. So far as " unconscious- 
ness" pertains to the developed soul, it is only in respect to 
the still unfilled primary powers. " Also in the developed 
human soul under the usual circumstances, the still unfilled 
primary powers are unconscious," 30 says Beneke. And 
adds, " They first become conscious by being filled with stimu- 
lants." The instant any of the primary powers receive 
stimulation, that instant the conscious experience of the soul 



begins. 



30 Lekrbuck, § %%. 



CHAPTER VII 

Applied Psychology — Metaphysics 

§ 92. Introduction — Psychology was regarded by Beneke 
as the fundamental science, of which all the other philosophi- 
cal disciplines are merely applications. These applications, 
to Ethics, Logic, Pedagogy and Metaphysics, Beneke has 
worked out with a consistency of principle, elaborateness of 
detail and profoundness of insight that make all his works 
on these subjects worthy of more careful and extended 
study than has hitherto been given to them anywhere, Ger- 
many included. Important, however, as all these applica- 
tions are, it will be possible here to consider only the Meta- 
physics. 

Beneke's Metaphysics was first published at Berlin in 1840, 
under the title : System der Metaphysik und Religions-philoso- 
phie aus den natitrlichen Grundverhaltnissen des menschlichen 
Geistes abgeleitet. The work is divided into three chief 
parts, the first treating of the definition of the relation be- 
tween presentation and being in general ; the second being 
an investigation of the forms and relations which lay claim 
to reality ; the third being an investigation of our belief in 
the supra-sensible, this part being termed by Beneke Relig- 
ions-philosophie. In the following exposition of Beneke's 
metaphysical standpoint, I cannot of course attempt to follow 
his formal argument. I can only set forth the spirit of his 
Metaphysics, and call attention to its chief points, with the 
hope that this may lead to further study and investigation. 
140 [406 



40; ] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE x 4 j 

I THE ORIGINAL NATURE AND BEING OF THE SOUL 

§ 93. Psychological Summary of the Nature of the Soul — 
If the preceding psychological analysis has taken true ac- 
count of the facts of experience and been correct in its in- 
terpretation of those facts, there are certain inevitable con- 
clusions which must be drawn as to the original nature and 
being of the soul. 

As to this original being, the whole process of psychical 
development has tended to show that there is nothing innate 
in the soul of man except those senso-spiritual primary 
powers by which the outer stimulants are taken up and ap- 
propriated for the formation of sensations, and those vital 
and muscular powers which are like in simplicity with the 
faculties of sensation. We must of course regard as an in- 
nate characteristic, however, of this concrete system of pri- 
mary powers, already originally organically combined, its 
ability to undergo transformations in accordance with the 
fundamental psychological processes already stated. To the 
primary powers, it is true, too, we must assign a twofold 
original definiteness of character. First, that of the partic- 
ular original fundamental system to which they belong, and 
second, an original definiteness of character, as indicated in 
their varying grades of reaction on stimulants. In this re- 
spect, the various systems seem to differ originally in their 
grade of vigorousness {Kraftigkeit) y quickness (Lebendigkeit) 
and irritability or susceptibility (Reizemfanglichkeit). The 
being of the developed soul differs from that of the original 
soul only in the more highly organized character of the in- 
terrelated systems, due to their stimulation both from with- 
out and from within. 1 Originally each of the primary pow- 
ers was a blind impulse striving for its outer stimulation. 
When once stimulated it sinks to a trace because of a par- 

1 The inner character of the developed soul is thus partly self-determined. 



I4 2 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [408 

tial disappearance of its stimulation. So far as it is a trace 
it is likewise a striving (Strebung) , longing or aiming to re- 
cover its lost stimulation. Thus it results that " in the de- 
veloped human soul, there are found two fundamental kinds 
of strivings : the still unstimulated primary powers, and 
those which have again become free through the disappear- 
ance of stimulants. The latter are distinguished from the 
first in precisely this, that they are strivings after something 
(i, e., after an exactly definite stimulation). In other re- 
spects the fundamental character of both is the same ; and 
all strivings arising through the disappearance of stimulants 
arise finally from the primary powers given originally un- 
filledr 

§ 94. Unity of Consciousness Distinguished from Unity of 
Being — The unity of consciousness, now, is to be sharply 
distinguished from this " universal and indeterminate unity" 
which pertains to the original being of the soul. The soul 
originally is unconscious, in the only^true sense of that word, 
but in virtue of the " inborn tendency" of the primary pow- 
ers for consciousness (eine angeborene Anlage fur das 
Bewusstsein), 3 we may speak of consciousness as one of the 
possible properties of it, and therefore ascribe consciousness 
to it in an adjectival sense of the word. There is, however, 
a more substantial sense in which the term consciousness 
may be used of the soul. In this sense it pertains to the de- 
veloped or developing soul, and refers to that organized tis- 
sue of unconscious traces which constitutes the " inner 
being" of the soul. 4 By " unity of consciousness," therefore, 

"Lehrbuch, § 168 3 Ibid., § 57. 

4 This developed inner being is of course to be distinguished from the original 
inner being, or organic system of unstimulated and unconnected (i. e. secondarily 
unconnected) primary powers. If the primary power, after appropriating a stim- 
ulant, becomes a " trace" by the partial disappearance of this stimulant, then in 
the developed inner being we have power and stimulant still in combination, but 



409] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE ^3 

we may refer either to the unity of the presented contents of 
the clear momentary experience (or some particular percept 
or idea forming part of that content), or to the unity which 
would be possessed for consciousness by the whole mass of 
accumulated conscious forms, if these forms by adequate 
stimulation of the whole system of powers of the soul, were 
all simultaneously presented as clear consciousness. 5 But 
the important point to notice is that whicheyer way we 
conceive it, unity of consciousness is always to be distin- 
guished from the original being of the primary powers,, 
howsoever dependent it may be on the latter. 

§ 95. The Soul a Concrete Psychical Organism — With 
Beneke, therefore, the soul is neither a tabula rasa, nor a 
transcendental unity, somehow pre-furnished with certain 
original " forms " or " categories," by " stamping " which on 
the raw sense-material fortuitously furnished it from without, 
it constitutes experience. Not a tabula rasa, because the 
character of sensation is determined by the nature of the 
appropriating primary power as well as by the irritating 
stimulant. " The human soul in the case of no process is 
purely passive ; even for the production of the liveliest sense 
impression is a species of activity necessary on its part." 6 

with the difference that the strength of stimulation is not sufficient to make the 
given psychical form, or sensation, (or rather what would be the sensation or the 
presented contents, if the stimulation were sufficient), enter clearly as part of the 
contents of clear consciousness. There is no objection to or contradiction in 
speaking of this combination of power and stimulant as inner " consciousness," if 
we bear clearly in mind the meaning of consciousness as " process," varying in 
grades from full excitation (Erregtheif) to complete non-excitation (Nicht- 
Erregtheii) . 

5 This aspect of consciousness, dealing with " Reality" as distinguished from 
" Being," appears to be the ultimate standpoint of those thorough-going empiri- 
cists who confine themselves to what Kant called " nature as a totality of objects 
of experience;" for example, Mr. Lewes, in his " cosmos of experience," and Mr. 
Spencer, in his phenomenal world of " the knowable." How Beneke transcends 
this point of view, the text shows. 

6 Lehrbuch, § 23, note 2. 



!44 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [ 4IO 

Nor a being stored with preformed " categories," because the 
forms of intuition and the categories are but logical dis- 
tinctions for consciousness, and as such are but the content of 
an idea in inner experience. 7 Objective validity in a certain 
sense they have, but not objective existence, or rather being 
in and for themselves. So far as they have being, their 
being is to be found in the being of the particular concepts 
of which they are the content. And as to concepts, the 
whole preceding psychological analysis has tended to show 
that of these ''there are absolutely none inborn." Their 
being then is nothing apart from just those particular primary 
powers in whose connections and stimulation the concept 
consists, and of which it is the "presented content" aspect. 
The soul, therefore, according to Beneke, is a concrete 
psychical organism whose activity in consequence of stimu- 
lation from without manifests itself in the form of conscious 
experience, and this experience for the developed soul dis- 
tinguishes itself into a twofold aspect — outer and inner. 

II THE NATURE AND LIMITS OF KNOWLEDGE 

§ 96. The Intuition of Self — From what has already been 
said it is obvious now that we must distinguish sharply the 
true self from the knowledge of self. The true self Beneke 
regards in a twofold aspect : first, as the undeveloped being 
or self, which consists in the original systems of primary 
powers organically combined, which original combinations 
or relations are the only permanent or unchanging relations 
of the soul; second, as the "concrete Ego," which, in con- 
sequence of its constant stimulation from both without and 
within, and the new connections and relations thereby estab- 
lished within it, changes with every momentary experience. 

7 " Even the so-called categories ox pure concepts of the understanding of Kant 
show themselves, on deeper examination, as having been formed from intuitions, 
and as presentations of our own self-consciousness." Lehrbuch, § 122, note 2. 



4 I i ] FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE 1 45 

It is with this latter concretely developing self that our 
knowledge endeavors to keep pace ; but so far as we know it, 
we apprehend it in a concept, which, in its being, is only a 
small portion of the total being of the soul, but which, in its 
reference, is the refined essence of the whole rich manifold of 
our preceding conscious experience, outer and inner. The 
intuition of self, therefore, is no innate concept, in the sense 
that we are equipped with it at the start in life's journey 
through experience. It is a concept which only gradually 
and after a long attentive process builds itself up as a per- 
manent possession of our inner consciousness. This concept, 
too, to be true, must be developed by the experiencing indi- 
vidual himself. While the concept of self as an outer and 
inner conscious experience combined in the organic unity 
of a personal being may represent the high-water mark of 
philosophical speculation, only those individuals who have 
reached this intuitive insight through a long reflective pro- 
cess on their own experiences, by which they have mounted 
step by step and higher and higher from an obscure sensu- 
ous basis to this clear spiritual insight, can be said to have, 
in any true sense of the word, such an intuition of self. 

§ 97. The Origin and Content of "Inner Sense" — The 
concept of experience as an outer and inner form of con- 
sciousness, that is, as appearances to a perceiving self, rep- 
resents a very advanced stage in the evolution of knowledge. 
And since in inner sense we seem to get nearest the soul 
itself, we may now inquire how this faculty of inner percep- 
tion has grown up. That it has grown is not lacking in 
evidence. How long it took human consciousness to reach 
the phenomenalistic conception of itself, such as it attained 
in the idealism of Berkeley and the empiricism of Hume, is 
a matter of philosophical history. How possible it is for a 
person to perceive objects, experience feelings, or perform 
actions, without ever being in the slightest degree conscious 



! 46 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE [4 x 2 

of these experiences as perceptions, as feelings, as volitions, 
is a matter of every-day experience. Children see and hear, 
remember and pass judgment, yet in the early periods of 
their career they are never conscious of their particular ex- 
periences, as perceptions, as memories, as judgments. In 
other words, " inner sense," in the strict sense of perceiving 
certain of one's experiences as inner, does not exist for them. 
They have no perceptive faculty for their own soul's develop- 
ment. How then is this formed, and, as a concept, what is 
its content? 

Inner sense perception, in Beneke's view, is nothing more 
than a distinction for consciousness. So far as we know 
memories, concepts, judgments, inferences, as memories, 
concepts, judgments or inferences, in other words, as facts of 
inner experience, we have already abstracted from the con- 
tents of certain original experiences and brought into clear 
consciousness particular " aspects " of these experiences. 
These " aspects " constitute the contents of a new concept \ 
which in its turn may through further reflection be conceived 
as a fact of inner experience. Now any original sense ex- 
perience, if repeated a sufficient number of times in precisely 
the same way, will give rise to a concept, the concept being 
that apperceptive mass of similar traces, which, on the 
repetition of the original experience, rise into active con- 
sciousness and give it clearness. The like elements in var- 
ious concepts, by a process of mutual attraction, transference 
of movable elements, and sufficient repetition, give rise to 
other higher concepts, and just such a concept as this is the 
faculty of inner sense. It originates in the coalescence of the 
similar elements in subjective forms. " Inner sense arises 
in the concepts which fefer themselves to the psychical qual- 
ities, forms and relations. If those concepts which have as 
their content the clear presentation of these qualities, etc., 
become particular experiences for consciousness, they them- 



413] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE 1 47 

selves thereby become, on the side of consciousness, so 
strengthened and cleared, that these particular experiences 
become intuitively perceived {yorgestellt werden). Conse- 
quently, as well in the case of inner perception, in its com- 
plete formation, as in that of outer, we find essentially the 
same fundamental form as that which gave itself a very dis- 
tinct stamp in the case of judgments. That is, the particular 
feelings, strivings, etc., take, in this case, the place of the 
subject ', and the apperceiving concept, or inner sense, the place 
of the predicate y 9, 

§ 98. The Soul the Only Being Known in Itself- — We are 
now in a position to see what is the most fundamental out- 
come of Beneke's psychology, and, as such, the foundation 
stone of his Metaphysics — the soul is the only thing in itself 
of which we have absolute knowledge. Beneke agrees with 
Kant that both forms of experience, outer and inner, are ap- 
pearances, or phenomena, in the sense that they are both 
the product of two sets of factors. But as process, external 
perception and internal perception are radically different. 
External perception distinguishes itself by the presence of 
what is, as it were, a foreign element. That is, an external 
presentation is the product of the primary power and ele- 
ments outer to the soul (Reize), whereas an internal presenta- 
tion is the product of elements wholly within the soul. " In 
the case of inner perception," therefore, "not only the being 
of that which is taken up and intuitively presented is attained 
to by the perception or intuition, but this being enters imme- 
diately into the presentation as an ingredient, and in conse- 
quence of this latter, there is added qualitatively not the 
slightest thing which was not also already contained in the 
being intuitively presented." 9 This is the ground, then, for 
Beneke's claim that in inner perception, in inner experience, 
we have •' a presentation of complete or absolute truth." 9 The 
soul is the only being which we know in and for itself. 

8 Lehrbuch, § 129. 9 Lekrbuch, § 129, note 4. 



1 48 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [4 j 4 

III KNOWLEDGE OF BEINGS OTHER THAN SELF 

§ 99. Fundamental Starting Point — If the fundamental 
question for metaphysics is the definition of the relation be- 
tween presentations and the beings which they are believed 
to represent, then, in the insight that we ourselves are a 
being in the apprehension of which, in inner sense, per- 
ception and being coalesce, without the admixture of any 
foreign element, we have a sure fundamental metaphysical 
starting point. " We are ourselves a being ; and conse- 
quently we do not need, in order to reach being {das Sein) 
to go out of ourselves into something else. Here we have or 
rather are perception and being at once, and consequently are 
able to compare genuinely and with complete satisfaction 
the perception with its being." 10 Beneke, even in one of his 
earliest works, gave a sharp and clear statement of this 
point. He says: 11 "To every act of perception, we saw, 
even though it were a perception of a perception, there be- 
longs, as an activity of the human soul, an existence in this 
soul ; this is so undoubted a fact for universal human con- 
sciousness that it cannot be denied even by the most ob- 
durate skeptic. If, consequently, it were possible for us to 
be always limited to mere acts of perception, at least in this 
act of perception itself we have a being incontestably within 
our power. But this act of perception we are able to per- 
ceive again without any difficulty ; and consequently there 
lies before us not merely a being, but also the comparison 
of it with one and the same act of perception that perceives 
it, and, therefore, the knowledge of the relation between per- 
ception and being lies open in at least one instance." 

§ 100. How Knowledge of the Existence of Other Beings is 
Attained — But now, if in outer perception our percept always 

10 System der Metaphysik, p. 75. 

11 Das Verhaltniss von Seele und Leib, p. 42. 



415] FRIED RICH ED UARD BENEKE j 49 

contains a foreign element to which we cannot reach in itself, 
how can we know even of the existence of other beings be- 
sides ourselves? Why are not the outer world and outer 
beings mere phantasmagoria of my own imagination, and I 
the only being that exists ? Knowledge of external being 
" would indeed be utterly impossible, and our sensations and 
sense perceptions of the outer world would remain purely 
subjective things, if the two classes of perceptions which we 
have, sensuous perceptions and those of our own self (or of 
being), were given entirely without connection one with the 
other. We should then of course in the case of the psychical 
processes, which we call sensations and perceptions of the 
outer world, have a feeling different from that in the case of 
our other psychical processes ; it would feel different in that 
case to us ; but without our knowing how to explain more 
precisely this difference ; and, consequently, in spite of this 
difference, they would never become for us perceptions or 
representations. 12 

But man is more than a soul ; he is also a body, and this 
body has its representatives among the phenomena of ex- 
ternal perception. Therefore " there is one being, of which 
we have at one and the same time both kinds of perceptions. 
This is our own being. We perceive ourselves at one time 
immediately through self -consciousness (through which orig- 
inally the concept of being arises, and through which alone 
it can arise), and in addition we perceive ourselves sensu- 
ously: our figure, the tones of our voice, etc., in a word, all 
that we call our body; and these two kinds of perceptions 
(or feelings) become associated together from the first mo- 
ment of life on, and continually grow in the course of life 
ever more intimately united." 13 

As to that particular group or series of external percep- 

12 System der Metaphysik, p. 79. 13 System der Metapkysik, p. 79. 



1 5 o FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [4 Y § 

tions we have learned to call our own body, Beneke asks, 
why we class only a particular group with ourselves and re- 
late them to ourselves as our body ? One group of phe- 
nomena in the picture before us we call another man's body, 
another group we call our own. And yet originally in and 
for themselves external sense perceptions have no predispo- 
sition either to appear as perceptions of things in themselves, 
or to show any particular connection with our internal sense 
perceptions. The reason is to be found in the fact that those 
perceptions which are foreign to our own being sometimes 
are given in consciousness and sometimes not, and uncere- 
moniously change without any reference to our own circum- 
stances. On the other hand, however, "the sensuous impres- 
sions and perceptions which we class with ourselves, are con- 
tinuously present to us, and change themselves parallel with 
that which our self-consciousness places before us. Originally 
and in itself the bond of connection between the form of 
our hand, the tone of our voice, etc., and our inner states 
had not the slightest superiority over the bond of union 
which occurs between these states and the form, the noise, 
etc., of a waterfall which we perceive and feel accidentally 
coexisting in one single instance. But this latter connection 
becomes dissolved again, or at least does not grow up to a 
high grade of strength, whereas, on the other hand, the for- 
mer through a thousand and ten thousand-fold repetition 
rises to the highest grade of strength ; and only in this way, 
very gradually, the perceptions and feelings of our own body 
present themselves from out the assembled throng of others 
as one specific thing. They become this entirely by virtue 
of the intimate association brought about by an endlessly 
repeated coexistence." 14 

§ 1 01. The Being of Other Men — Here, then, in the sen- 

14 System der Metaphysik, pp. 80-81. 



417] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 5 x 

suous perception of our own bodies, have we the basis of our 
method for transcending external phenomena so as to reach 
the being of other existences. And this method, Beneke 
claims, is entirely that of analogy. In inner perception or 
experience the soul knows itself in and for itself, it attains to 
its own being; in outer perception or experience, there is at 
least one phenomenal existence, its own body, whose being 
it is able to appreciate ; since the close similarity of another 
man's body to our own can be a matter of immediate experi- 
ence, both bodies occurring simultaneously, as phenomena 
in outer conscious experience ; by analogy we conclude that 
his body is representative of a being like that which we 
know to underlie our own body. " Man, just because he is 
man, cannot apprehend and intuitively perceive in complete 
truth any other being than a human one. Complete truth, 
indeed, requires complete agreement between the perceiving 
act and the being perceived ; and consequently only so far 
as our being reaches, common perceptions reach to complete 
truth. What we may perceive as metaphysically true, that 
must we be able to become, and whilst we are perceiving it, 
must really become or be it. Therefore then the province of 
this act of presentation metaphysically true extends to, be- 
sides our own soul's being, only the being of the souls of 
other men most like unto ourselves. All that lies without 
this province we are able to represent to ourselves only either 
by analogies (similes) with the human soul, or by the effects 
which it produces on our senses : in the first case, therefore, 
by virtue of what is given in our own being in perfect una- 
nimity with the foreign being, in the second case, by virtue 
of a certain entrance into our soul of what originally was 
outer." 15 

§ 102. The Being of Material Things — Further, therefore, 

15 System der Metaphysik, pp. 123-24. 



1 5 2 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [4 j 3 

in respect to the existence of material things, so far as we 
descend in the scale of organic existences more and more un- 
like our own, so far are we decreasingly unable even analogi- 
cally to represent these to ourselves in their inner being. 
While usually we are prone to assign more objective reality 
to our external perceptions of material things, because of 
their greater clearness, we must not forget that, as the pre- 
ceding psychological analysis has made out, this superiority 
in clearness is really grounded purely subjectively. Since in- 
ternal perceptions can gain an even greater clearness, it is a 
mistake to regard the substratum of external perceptions as 
the only truly real, or a " being in the highest sense of this 
word." We must conclude then that "the presentations of 
material things are only appearances, to which of course a 
true being or a being-in-itself corresponds, but which we are 
able to comprehend at best only incompletely and by analogies 
more or less close and enduring. We have of them no 
being-yielding-knowledge, (An-sich-Erkenntniss) , but merely 
a knowledge of effects, i. e., a knowledge by means of 
those processes which the imprint of the thing in connection 
with our faculties of perception and sensation, causes to arise 
in us. These products, consequently, or the intuitions of 
material things, exist as such only in us ; and we are able in 
no manner to resolve them into their factors, so that we 
might be able to apprehend the real which is without us in 
its complete truth or in its in-itselfness." 16 

§ 103. The External World, so far as Concerns our Fellow 
Beings, Neither Unknown nor Unknowable — Thus, while so 
far as material things, in the sense of lower organisms, inor- 
ganic matter and chemical atoms, are concerned, we may 
have no adequate knowledge of the supra-sensible, it is not 
true that the external world, in the sense of meta-phenomenal 

16 System der Metaphysik, p. 1 20. 



4 1 9] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE j 5 3 

being, is entirely unknown and unknowable to us. In the 
knowledge of the existence of our fellow creatures, we have a 
knowledge that is at once profoundly and scientifically 
grounded on immediate experience, and yet which transcends 
that experience. 

IV GOD AND IMMORTALITY 

§ 104. Introduction — The third main division of his Meta- 
physik Beneke terms Religions-philosophie, as having to do 
with such suprasensible being as constitutes the peculiar ob- 
ject of religion. A distinguishing characteristic and a radi- 
cal departure of Beneke's Metaphysik in this respect, is its 
relegation of the question of the freedom of the will to 
Ethics as a purely scientific and empirical question. This 
question, as well as that of the cause of evil, and the means 
of removing it, " have to do through and through with what 
is given in experience, or with facts, and these allow them- 
selves to be completely understood and treated in accord- 
ance with the natural laws of our own soul." 17 The two 
chief questions, therefore, to be considered concern God and 
Immortality. 

§ 105. The Existence of God — In his treatment of the ex- 
istence of God, Beneke shows most the influence upon him 
of Jacobi, and the " Glaubensphilosophie." So far as the ob- 
ject of religion is the suprasensible, in a sense differing from 
our fellow beings and similar beings, to this we can only ap- 
proximate in that most highly developed subjective state of 
feeling called conviction or faith. This feeling " can acquire 
the highest certainty of conviction ; but we cannot objectify 
it, i. e. t with complete truth perfect it as an object of our 
knowledge." 18 Beneke, therefore, in summing up the matter, 
says : " Of only a single class of existences are we able to 

17 System der Metaphysik : Vorrede, xi. 18 Metaphysik, p. 565. 



■j 54 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [420 

gain a completely clear and profoundly comprehensive 
knowledge — human souls. Of everything else, whether it 
be ever so near us and be given in manifold ways, we appre- 
hend first of all only the superficies, or appearance, not its 
inner being, its own individual existence; and however we 
strain our faculty of knowledge, we are able, in respect to 
these latter, to form nothing further than an obscure and in- 
definite analogy with our own being. Beyond the whole 
province of what becomes immediately given or presented 
to us, there opens up besides the unending realm of the non- 
presented {Nicht-Gegeben) : (from the lowest being) up to 
the Being of all beings, the Author and Ruler of all that ex- 
ists. But of this realm still less are we in a position to 
know: not through our knowledge do we attain to it, but 
our flight thereto must be reached from another side, from 
the side of emotion, which gives us wings in Faith and 
Hope." 19 

§ 106. Immortality™ — Beneke's doctrine of the immortality 
of the soul is perhaps one of the most profoundly scientific 
attempts at the resolution of this problem ever put forth. 
It promises not an immortal atomism, but an immortal per- 
sonality. It has its basis entirely in his scientific psy- 
chology. 

Beneke attempts first to answer the question, what is 
natural death ? We have come, in the preceding psy- 
chology, to regard the soul as an organic system of primary 
powers, and to postulate that for every outer sensuous im- 
pression a special unfilled primary power of the soul is used. 
For the existence of these primary powers two hypotheses 
are possible. Either the entire number necessary for the 

19 Metaphysik, pp. 598-99. 

20 Compfere Lehrbuch, Chap. 8, IV: " Von den innersten Grundformen des 
Lsbens und des Todes." Also, Metaphysik, Part III, Section 2: " Die Fortdauer 
der menschlichen Seele nach dem 7'ode." 



42 1 ] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE Y 5 5 

x 

whole life of an individual is already and originally given at 
birth, or, the soul has the power to form ever anew fresh 
like powers. We have had to postulate, as the innermost 
life process, the continuous production of new primary 
powers. Now we have seen how all psychical processes 
tend to remain in the inner being of the soul as traces, and 
how, in the course of life, this inner being gains in increasing 
richness. We have seen, too, how by unnumbered repeti- 
tion these traces not only gain in strength and in intimacy 
of union, but, with this increased strength, require less 
stimulation either by external elements or internal stimulants, 
to become aroused into clear consciousness. The child and 
the youth seek ever new sensations and stimulation from 
without, the activity of the man is rather spent in reproduc- 
ing and working out the assembled mass of previously 
gathered experiences. As life progresses, then, in conse- 
quence of the activity of the soul being turned more and 
more upon its inner self, the formation of new powers be- 
comes limited. In consequence further of this limitation of 
the outer life of the soul, the concentration of the psychical 
processes upon the inner being mounts higher and higher. 
A time then must come when the formation of new powers 
like unto the primary ones either entirely ceases, or is not 
sufficient to produce enough powers to maintain the usual 
span of outer consciousness. Outer consciousness conse- 
quently ceases, and this is natural death. 

As to the continued existence of the soul after death, a 
psychology grounded entirely on experience of course can 
present only conjectures. But this psychology has tended 
to show that death, in the natural sense, is a daily process. 
The more highly organized a man's inner consciousness be- 
comes, the nearer he approaches natural death. Death, then, 
is not a dulling of the inner powers, but rather a " continuous 
strengthening of the inner upbuilding." The essential aspect 



!j6 FRIED RICH EDUARD BEN EKE [422 

of death is to be found in the destruction of the coherence 
between the inner being of the soul and the outer world, 
upon which, of course, during the progress of our earthly- 
life, the conscious developments of our soul have been de- 
pendent. Consciousness, therefore, must cease, too. But 
the inner or more spiritual consciousness, which has arisen on 
the original basis of sensuous experience, has become a per- 
manent possession of the soul. If, then, the soul have a 
continued existence hereafter, for the excitation and further 
perfection of its inner organization, there " would not, per- 
haps, be necessary again a new sensuous system, but merely 
such environment as would have the power to make active 
or consciousness-producing those powers ( Vermogen) which 
were founded in this life and have become unconscious traces 
or elements tending to produce active consciousness " 21 (An- 
gelegtheiten) . 

21 Metaphysik, p. 460. 



CONCLUDING CHAPTER 



I BRIEF CRITICAL ESTIMATE 



THE most important general characteristic of Beneke's 
philosophical system is its remarkable combination of sound 
common sense with profound metaphysical insight. This 
alone, not to mention its admirable clearness of statement, 
ought to commend the system to all English philosophical 
students. It has been justly said of the system, too, that it 
begins and ends with experience. This is only a brief way 
of paying tribute at once to its profoundly scientific char- 
acter, and to its value for practice. 

Whatever may be said in criticism of detailed points of 
this system of philosophy, I believe it will be some day gen- 
erally conceded that Beneke has made four cardinal and per- 
manent contributions to philosophical theory. These may 
be summarized as follows : 

1 . In internal sense-perception we are able to know ourselves, 
not as a phenomenon, but with complete metaphysical truth. In 
the insight that the only being we truly know, i. e., know in 
itself, is that of our own soul, Beneke marks his great ad- 
vance on Kant. As Beneke himself claimed, in the knowl- 
edge of the being of self we have for " in-itselfness," for true 
being, a clearly defined standard which can guide us with its 
clear light through all the other labyrinthine paths of meta- 
physical discussion. ' 

2. Consciousness or knowledge is to be clearly distinguished 
in its aspects as clear presentation or appearance, and as prese?i- 
tative process. In its former aspect, it must be regarded in the 

423 I 57 



^8 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE \^2-A- 

case of external perception, as the product of objective (or 
" external") and subjective factors; in the case of internal 
perception, of subjective factors entirely. When, therefore, 
it is asserted that we know our own soul's being,, this means, 
not that we have an innate idea or intuition of self, co-exten- 
sive or identical with our soul's complete organic being, but 
that in these entirely derived forms of knowledge or con- 
sciousness discriminated as facts of inner sense or experi- 
ence, neither of the component factors is "sense-material" in 
the Kantian sense of a foreign element from without, but 
both factors are psychical, that is, both are ingredients or 
parts of our own soul's being. 

3. In consequence of the distinction of unity of conscious- 
ness from unity of being, the individual soul or self must be 
regarded, not as an undifferentiated abstract unity, but rather 
as a concrete psychical organism, consisting in various sub- 
systems or organic groups of primary powers. The demon- 
stration of self as a concrete system of distinct but organ- 
ically interrelated parts, arrived at by a purely empirical 
method, is a valuable achievement. 

4. In the knowledge that back of the external perceptions 
called our own body there exists a true psychical being — a 
being in itself that is directly known to us — we have an an- 
alogical but valid means of escape from a purely subjective 
idealism. In internal perception we know ourselves as a 
psychical being. In external perception we know ourselves 
as a corporeal being. Through this twofold knowledge of 
self we are able to transcend self and get at the existence of 
like beings. 

These cardinal contributions to philosophical theory, 
moreover, result in a general metaphysical conception of the 
individual self or soul that is particularly valuable as offering 
a rational and satisfactory explanation of many vexed psy- 
chological and philosophical questions. While it will be im- 



425] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE I 5 g 

possible to take up the consideration of these questions here 
with any detail, I should at least like to call attention to the 
particular significance of Beneke's theory for such problems 
as the association of ideas, subconscious mental life, 
latent mental modifications, and the general doctrine of 
evolution. 

While Beneke is a thoroughgoing associationist, with him, 
as the preceding text has attempted to show, it is not ideas 
that become associated. That is, ideas in the sense of the 
qualitative details of the presented contents of conscious ex- 
perience. Ultimately it is not sensations that combine to 
make up the complex of adult conscious experience, since 
sensations themselves, even if realizable, would be only ap- 
pearances. It is the underlying factors of sensations that 
become associated. Moreover, the mooted problem, if such 
an inconceivability can be called a problem, of how a series 
of events could ever become conscious of itself as a series,.. 
becomes fully and rationally provided for in the organic 
unity which must be conceived as already belonging to the 
fundamental elements of the sub-systems of the soul and to 
these systems as a whole. Matter too is scarcely to be de- 
fined as a mere " permanent possibility of sensation." A 
mere possibility is nothing. Matter is something truly real, 
and so far as it exists in an organic form approximating to 
our own bodily organism, we have some true knowledge re- 
garding its nature. 

Beneke's general theory of the self throws valuable light, 
too, on the psychological problems of subconscious mental life 
and latent mental modifications. Both these problems in- 
volve the nature of retention, that is, the nature of supposed 
facts not immediately present in conscious experience. They 
therefore are insoluble except on a metaphysical basis, 
meaning by this some general conception of the nature of 
conscious experience as a whole. It is usual to interpret 



I0 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE V^ 2 6 

retention in either of two ways. The first interpretation 
conceives retention as the continued existence of an idea, AS 
AN IDEA; the second, as the mere psychological persistence of 
a modification of nerve structure. Beneke's general concep- 
tion, while precluding either of these as ultimate interpreta- 
tions, embodies the partial truth of both. The usual 
objection to the first interpretation is that if all experience 
is to be regarded as a form of consciousness or knowledge, 
then it is a contradiction in terms to speak of an " uncon- 
scious" or even a ''subconscious" idea. An idea is essen- 
tially a form of consciousness. But this rigid insistence on 
terminology ignores the common ambiguity in the uses of 
the term consciousness. Beneke meets this objection in his 
distinction of varying grades of presented contents, and also 
in the insistence that it is not qualitative content as such 
that is retained, but primary powers and stimulants in a more 
or less durable connection. This last statement reveals the 
basis of what would be his objection to the purely physio- 
logical interpretation of retention. Nerve structure and 
nerve process are not the ultimate facts. Nerve structure 
is known only so far as perceived. As perceived it is a 
phenomenon in some individual conscious experience. As 
phenomenon it is the product of objective and subjective 
factors — the external stimulants and the internal primary 
powers. These stimulants or these powers may become 
structurally "modified," but this is a different thing from 
making retention a modification of nervous structure as 
known. 

Finally, Beneke's general theory is of peculiar value for the 
general doctrine of evolution. It has been acutely said of Mr. 
Spencer's valuable contributions to this doctrine that almost 
all of what is said on this score would be equally true and 
valuable on a metaphysical basis entirely and radically differ- 
ent from that furnished by the synthetic philosophy. In the 



42 7 J FRIED RICH ED UARD BEN EKE j £ r 

synthetic philosophy the lack of adequate appreciation of 
the true metaphysical problem always has been, and will be, 
the stumbling block to its full acceptance. In Beneke's 
theory we have a most thoroughgoing evolutionary concep- 
tion combined with the profoundest metaphysical insight. 
Evolution may be, and doubtless is, both an individual and 
a cosmical process, but in either case it is one which takes 
place in an essentially psychical being, that is, in a being 
which exists primarily in and for itself, and which is already 
originally an organic unit. 

It is not to be inferred from what has been said above that 
Beneke's system is without defects and not in need of any 
further supplementing. His most serious metaphysical de- 
fect, perhaps, is in assigning a qualitative difference to exter- 
nal stimulants, and yet regarding these not only as entering 
into connection with the primary powers of the soul, but as 
being actually transformed into psychical elements, and thus 
being made permanent possessions of the psychical organ- 
ism. The logic of the situation, however, is such as to lead, 
not to the rejection of Beneke's view, but rather to the ex- 
tension of his conception of organism to include all being. 
This, however, is not to identify the individual with the cos- 
mos or God, whichever we chose to call all being, any more 
than, for example, the system of primary powers constitut- 
ing the sense of sight is to be identified with the whole being 
of the individual self or soul possessing it. Both are distinct 
differentiations of the total organism, both are centres of 
activity determining the action of and being determined by 
the action of the whole. The true source of the conception 
of organism is mind, not matter. 

II PERMANENT INFLUENCE AND FOLLOWERS 

A word now remains to be said as to Beneke's permanent 
influence and principal disciples. This influence, which, for 



1 62 FRIEDRICH ED UARD BENEKE [42 8 

accidental reasons already in part pointed out, has been 
chiefly pedagogical rather than either psychological or 
philosophical, it will be convenient to speak of first as re- 
gards Germany itself, and then as regards other lands. 

It is scarcely too much to say that in Germany, Beneke's 
philosophical influence has been almost nil. The two chief 
reasons for this have been, on the one hand, the overwhelm- 
ing weight of Hegelianism ; on the other, the preponderat- 
ing influence of the Herbartian Psychology. And yet it is 
not far from the truth to say that this eclipse of Beneke's 
philosophical standpoint has been the direct result, not of a 
fair contest, but of injustice and misrepresentation. The 
unjust attempt, originating in Hegelian sources, to stifle 
Beneke's thought, has already been sufficiently pointed out. 
The equally unfair attempt to dispose summarily of Beneke's 
psychology as well as of his pedagogics, as a mere modified 
Herbartianism, has likewise been shown to be ungrounded, 
although it has since been perpetuated by numerous writers. 
Perhaps the only more distinctly philosophical work largely 
influenced by the thought of Beneke is that of C. Fortlage, 
whose work Ueberweg speaks of as "a compound of 
Beneke's empiricism and Kanto-Fichtean speculation with 
independent modifications." Fortlage's chief works are : 
System der Psychologie (Leipzig, 1855); Psychologische 
Vortrdge (Jena, 1868), and Philosophische Vortrage (Ibid., 
1869). 

On the pedagogical side Beneke's influence has been much 
greater. The most prominent among his pedagogical fol- 
lowers, and the man who has done most to elucidate, defend 
and extend his thought, was Johann Gottlieb Dressier 1 (died 
1867), one time director of the Seminar in Bautzen. Another 
name that deserves always to be associated with Beneke is 

1 See Bibliography. 



429] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE 163 

that of Dr. G. Raue, whose exposition of the outlines of 
Beneke's psychology {Die neue Seelenlehre, already referred 
to as afterwards enlarged and extended by Dressier) did 
perhaps more than anything else to popularize his system 
among teachers. Others who made various applications of 
Beneke's principles to the theory of education are mentioned, 
with the titles of their works, in the bibliography which 
follows. 

Outside of Germany, Beneke's work, while not unknown, 
has so far exerted no appreciable influence. In two com- 
paratively recent and important psychological treatises in 
America, 1 Beneke in one case is not even mentioned ; in 
another, he is dismissed in a few sentences. A third work 2 
shows considerable traces of Beneke ; but with a tendency 
to reflect the undue emphasis of Beneke as scientific peda- 
gogist only. In England, too, attention to Beneke has been 
slight. Sully 3 avails himself of some of Beneke's pedagogi- 
cal results. The only real attempt in the English language 
at a serious study of some of Beneke's results, has been the 
paragraphs on Beneke in the article in Mind, by Mr. G. F. 
Stout, already referred to. In France, M. Ribot, in the first 
edition of his Psychologie Allemande Contemporaine, called 
attention to the neglect of Beneke in Germany, but gave 
only a meagre exposition of his system. His attempt, there- 
fore, as reproducing the letter rather the spirit of Beneke, 
proved unsuccessful, and so was withdrawn from the second 
edition. 

'James: Principles of Psychology (2 vols., New York, 1893); Ladd: Ele- 
ments of Physiological Psychology (New York, 1888). 

2 Dewey: Psychology (New York, 1893). 

3 Outlines of Psychology (New York, 1893). 



!64 FRIED RICH EDUARD BENEKE [430 

III BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1. LIFE — The chief and almost only source is Diesterweg's 
Pddagogisches Jahrbuch fur 1856. In this is contained, be- 
sides an excellent portrait of Beneke, first, a short comment 
by Diesterweg ; second, the fullest account of Beneke extant, 
by Dr. Schmidt ; third, a valuable biographical addition by 
Dressier. Of the summaries in the histories of philosophy 
Ueberweg's is the best (pp. 282-283, Vol. II). In some of 
his own writings, however, Beneke has left an interesting 
record of his intellectual development, particularly in Die neite 
Psychologie (Berlin, 1845), third essay: " On the relation of 
my Psychology to Herbart's." The brief memorial, Kant 
und die philosophische Aufgabe unserer Zeit, is very valuable 
as showing his relations to contemporaries. Fortlage, in the 
fourth of his Acht Psychologische Vortr'dge (Jena, 1872), "On 
Character," turns aside to pay a glowing tribute to Beneke. 

2. WRITINGS — Many of Beneke's writings are hard to pro- 
cure, no complete edition of his works having ever been pub- 
lished. The bibliography in Ueberweg (pp. 283-86, Vol. 
II.) is very complete. The most complete and best list is 
that of Dressier, given as a supplement to the fourth edition of 
Beneke's Lehrbuch der Psychologie (Berlin,' 1877) 5 a ^ so pub- 
lished separate. Its value lies in its being also: "A Brief 
Characterization of the Complete Writings of Beneke, in the 
order of their publication." For Beneke's writings not men- 
tioned in the preceding text consult these sources. Deserv- 
ing of special mention, however, since so far Beneke's 
influence has been greatest in the field of education, is his 
Erziehnngs und Unterrichts-lehre (2 vols., Berlin, 1835 an d 
1836). 

3. Expositions of the System — Of the general exposi- 
tions of Beneke's philosophy in German histories of philoso- 
phy, by far the best, since the most complete and apprecia- 



4 3 I ] FRIEDRICH ED UARD BEN EKE x g 5 

tive, is the most recent, viz., that of Julius Bergmann, in his 
Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin, 1893): Vol. II., "Die 
deutsche Philosophie von Kant bis Beneke" pp. 544-583. 
Ueberweg's exposition (History, Vol. II., pp. 281-292) is 
a good summary for one already familiar with the spirit and 
method of Beneke. The account by Dr. Albert Stockl, in 
his Geschichte der neueren Philosophie von Baco und Cartesius 
bis zur Gegenwart (Mainz, 1883), Vol. II., pp. 258-282, is 
valuable for a certain fulness of exposition, but particularly 
as showing at once the nature and impotence of the hostile 
criticism directed against Beneke. The account by Falcken- 
berg (op. cit.) y while brief, is excellent. 

Besides the above-mentioned general sketches of Beneke's 
system, a thorough and complete popular exposition of his 
psychology has been made in German by G. Raue, in Die 
neue Seelenlehre Dr. Beneke's nach methodischen Grunds'dtzen 
in einfach entwickelnder W else fur Lehrerbearbeitet (Bautzen, 
1847) 5 later editions, including the fourth (Mayence, 1865) 
edited by Dressier (Translated into Flemish, by J. Black- 
huys, Ghent, 1859; into English, Oxford and London, 1871 ; 
also into French, says the Encyclopedia Britannica). A 
most complete popular summary of Beneke's whole system 
is that by Dressier in Diesterweg's Pddagogisches Jahrbuch 
fur 1856, pp. 33-105: " Ueber Beneke' s For schungen." A 
complete epitome of Die Lerhbuch der Psychologie, preserving 
so far as possible the sentences of the original, has been 
made by Gustav Hauffe, under the title " Professor Dr. Ed- 
uard Benecke's Psychologieals Naturwissenschaft" Borna- 
Leipzig, (vi. and 116 pp.). For a good exposition of Be- 
neke's educational standpoint see Lange's revised edition 
(Kothen, 1876) of Dr. Karl Schmidt's Geschichte der Pada- 
gogik : Vol. 4, article 37, pp. 1059-78. (Translated into 
English by Louis F. Soldan, Journal of Speculative Philoso- 
phy, October, 1876.) Compare also : Die Unterrichtslehre 



1 66 FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE [432 

Beneke im Vergleiche zur pddagogischen Didaktik Herbart, 
by Otto Emil Hummel (Leipzig). 

In English no independent investigation of Beneke's com- 
plete work exists. So far as his psychology is concerned, 
however, we have a brief critical and expository account in 
an article by Mr. G. F. Stout : " Herbart compared with 
English Psychologists and with Beneke." {Mind, January, 
1889.) His educational views are set forth in Barnard's 
Amer. Journal of Education, vol. 28: 54; vol. 24: 54. 

For M. Ribofs attempt to resuscitate Beneke, compare the 
first French edition of his Psychologie allemande contempo- 
raine. 

4. Works of Beneke's Followers — Beneke's followers 
have extended his system and its principles mainly in the 
field of education. The most prominent is Johann Gottlieb 
Dressier. Besides the works already mentioned, he pub- 
lished : Beitrdge zu einer bessern Gestaltung der Psychologie 
und Pddagogik, also entitled Beneke oder die Seelenlehre als 
Naturwissenschaft (Bautzen 1840-46); Praktische Denklehre 
(Ibid., 1852); 1st Beneke Materialist? Ein Beitrag zur 
Orientirung iiber Beneke's System der Psychologie, mit Ri'tck- 
sicht auf verse hie dene Einwurfe gegen dasselbe (Berlin, 1862) ; 
Die Gritndlehren der Psychologie und Logik (Leipsic, 1867, 
2d ed. by F. Dittes and O. Dressier, 1870) ; and numerous 
contributions to pedagogical journals, particularly Diester- 
weg's Pad agog. Jahrb. 

The following list of other writers largely influenced by 
Beneke is given on the authority of Ueberweg, Dressier, and 
the article on Beneke in Richard Lange's revised edition of 
Dr. Karl Schmidt's History of Pedagogics. J. R. Wurst, in 
his Die zwei ersten Schuljahre, applies Beneke's psychology 
to the theory of education ; his Sprachdenklehre derives its 
didactic form from Beneke. Kammel, on the basis of 
Beneke doctrines, made numerous contributions to Her- 



433] FRIEDRICH EDUARD BENEKE jfy 

gang's Pddagog. Realencyclopddie. Other writers of Beneke's 
school are : Otto Borner, Die Willensfreiheit, Zurech- 
nu7ig und Strafe (Freiberg, 1857); Friedrich Dittes, Das 
Aesthetische (Leipsic, 1854), Ueber Religion und religiose 
Menschenbildnng (Plauen, 1855), Naturlehre des Moralis- 
e/ten und Kunstlehre der moralischen Erziehung (Leipzig, 
1856), Ueber die sittliche Freiheit (Leipsic, i860), Grun- 
driss der Erziehungs und Unterrcihtslehre (Leipsic, 1868, 3d 
ed., 1 871) : Heinrich Neugeboren and Ludwig Korodi, who 
published the Vierteljahrsschrift fur die Seelenlehre at Cron- 
stadt from 1859 till 1861; F. Schmeding, Das Gemilth 
(Duisburg, 1868) ; also Ueberweg, who is frequently classed 
with the school of Beneke on account of his prize essay — 
Die Entwickelung des Bewusstseins durch den Lehrer und 
Erzieher (Eine Reihe pddagogisch-didaktischer Anwendungen 
der Beneke ' schen Bewusstseinstheorie, besonders auf den Un- 
terricht an Gymnasien und Realschulen. Berlin, 1853). 



VITA 



Francis Burke Brandt was born in Philadelphia, June 
13th, 1865. His early education was received in the public 
schools of that city. In 1880, after a two years' course at 
the Central High School, he left to enter business. In 1888 
he entered the Brown Preparatory School, Philadelphia, and 
the following year was admitted to Harvard College. Here 
he specialized in philosophy under Professors Royce, James, 
and Palmer, and Dr. Santayana. He was graduated from 
Harvard in 1892, after a three years' course, with the degree 
A. B., magna cum laude, and " honorable mention" twice in 
philosophy (in philos. (bis) excellentem) . He also had con- 
ferred on him at graduation "honors" in philosophy (in 
philosophia HONORES), in recognition of special examination 
and a thesis — " The Relation of the Kantian Philosophy to 
the Problems of the Present Day, and the Permanent Influ- 
ence of this Philosophy as a Criticism of the Powers of the 
Human Reason, both Theoretical and Practical." For two 
years after graduation he was instructor in English and 
Mathematics at Columbia Grammar School, New York City. 
During this period also he pursued graduate studies under the 
Faculty of Philosophy, Columbia College, attending ad- 
vanced courses in philosophy and education under Prof. 
Butler, and performing experiments in educational psychol- 
ogy under Prof. Cattell. In April, 1894, he was appointed 
for the succeeding academic year University Fellow in Phil- 
osophy at Columbia College. During the term of his fellow- 
ship he continued his studies in education and engaged in 
original research in German philosophy under the direction 
of Prof. Butler ; attended the seminary of Dr. Hyslop ; and 
studied sociology under Prof. Giddings, of the Faculty of 
Political Science. 

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